‘Bliss,’ Quentin replied. ‘The point evades you. A hierarchical society is inversely reciprocal. The satisfactions of the higher echelons lie in command, protection, responsibility, in giving orders; the satisfactions of the lower echelons lie in docility, security, myopia, in obeying orders. It’s a quasi-ritualistic enactment of one’s role.’

  ‘What if you had a dumb lord and a smart serf?’

  Andy pounced: ‘Then it’s tough shit on the serf!’

  ‘Precisely,’ Villiers affectionately agreed.

  With conviction Roxeanne said, ‘You people have to be kidding. What do you feel – hey, Giles.’

  Giles looked up, smiling palely.

  ‘Don’t ask him,’ said Andy. ‘He’s one too – practically a millionaire.’

  ‘Hey, Keith?’

  Whitehead’s boots were hurting him so much that he could hardly breathe, let alone speak.

  ‘Don’t ask him,’ said Andy. ‘He’s not anything. He’s just a wreck.’

  Roxeanne shook her head. ‘But you can’t regress. There’s no way. It’s too late for that now. All you can do is smash everything, raze the entire planet, and then start over, make it new.’

  ‘In which event,’ crooned Quentin, ‘a feudal society would soon re-establish itself. It sounds very arduous. Why bother?’

  ‘Not if you smashed everything. Culture, books, buildings, all the way back, every kind of institution, all the foci of—’

  ‘All the what?’ said Andy.

  ‘Foci.’

  ‘Fuck you too,’ he said, shrugging.

  ‘All the foci of human memory. Obliterate it all. Entirely. Then we could really start over.’

  Throughout the morning Giles’s anaesthetized ears had fastened on and absorbed only the odd word or phrase – ‘bridge . . . gumboot . . . I’d give my eye-teeth . . . to crown it all . . . cap in hand . . . that’s the drill . . . wisdom . . .’ At Roxeanne’s last words, however, he decided he could no longer remain silent. He sat up straight and said,

  ‘But what would happen – but what would happen to modern—?’

  Before Giles could stutter out the word dentistry, Andy was saying, ‘What’s going on here? Hey! What’s going on – there’s no more lush! Come on, what’s going on around here.’

  At length, Giles held out his cupboard keys.

  ‘Christ, Giles,’ Andy said earnestly, ‘what kind of stunt was that to try and pull?’

  ‘Gin for me, Andy, actually,’ said Giles.

  As Andy dashed from the room, Roxeanne turned to Quentin. Her voice was drained and plaintive. ‘. . . What’s the time ?’ she asked achingly.

  ‘How much more day is there?’ Lucy said.

  Quentin looked at his watch, a guilty host. It had stopped. ‘Not long,’ he said. ‘Not long.’

  Alcoholic inebriation had well passed the stage at which it might responsibly be explained away as extreme drunkenness. Even the relatively teetotal Celia had consumed well over a litre of brandy-orientated champagne cocktail. And yet the Appleseeders still seemed quite opinionatedly game. Their blood-pressures and body-temperatures were dropping, finding the time for various drugs to catch up on their stretched metabolisms. Whitehead, for example, felt that his torso might be a shipment of jumping beans, Diana and Celia alike believed that they were on the brink of grave hormonal upsets, Marvell burped with unusual volume and candour, and Lucy was under the impression that she was a ghost or a dead body. All about them, cellular and glandular negotiations raged.

  Marvell gazed at his watch. ‘Oh-kay,’ he said. ‘Everybody all right? We should be out the other side of this thing pretty soon. Just wander around a bit and do what feels best to do. Any more of that cocktail . . . ?’

  The air in the room rolled. People began to fall through doorways.

  43 Cruel Body

  All morning there had been talk between Andy and Skip of a game of badminton. Noticing that Skip’s mouth was white-crumbed with dehydration, Andy malevolently challenged him to an immediate match.

  ‘Now it’s not a fuckin American game,’ Andy briefed Skip as they extracted net and posts from the hall trunk. ‘So don’t try kicking it or heading it or running around with it or any crap like that. You just’ – he motioned with his racket – ‘wap it over the net with this, is all. O.K.? And watch it, cos I’m fucking good.’

  Diana went upstairs to view the game from her bedroom window. She did this partly because she felt too ill to tolerate company, and partly because the confusion of her feelings for Andy had not yet abated the pleasure of watching him move about when he thought her eyes weren’t on him. She lit a cigarette, resting her elbows on the wooded window-sill. The game began.

  Andy won a few quick points by variously fair and foul means, penalizing Skip for ‘technical’ misdemeanours, mispositioning him to receive serve, capriciously amending the rules; but Skip had caught on fast and was moreover proving stubborn about the more audacious contradictions in Andy’s scoring system. At 6–6, Andy was no longer master of his good temper, and when little Keith staggered out to admire the contest, Andy suggested that he fuck off again, menacing the craven Whitehead with his raised racket.

  To Diana, Andy and Skip seemed equally strong and skill-less, equally powerful and uncoordinated. Stripped to the waist, Andy looked marginally the more impressive, with his thick hair flapping and the glisten of sweat on his tanned back and glossy shoulders. Further, he had a habit of shouting Yeah! whenever he made a good shot and hooting sarcastically whenever Skip coerced him into a bad one. For all his clamorous bulk, though, Andy looked about seventeen. Skip, bespectacled, in T-shirt and khaki shorts, was far more composed, his mouth set resolutely throughout. And his body was hard and metallic by comparison, as if operated on tight cords – a sharp and unfriendly body, a cruel body.

  ‘Johnny,’ said Diana.

  After a long, noisy rally, in which several reverses appeared to take place, Andy snapped his racket over his knee and stalked back towards the house, watched by a blank-faced Skip. Diana peered down as Andy’s head bobbed out of sight. She smiled unpleasantly, until her eyes returned to the centre of the lawn, where they were met by the American’s.

  44 Wars and Shit

  ‘I can’t believe I’m hearing this babies,’ said Marvell. ‘What are you, a fuckin flower-child?’

  Giles did not reply.

  ‘Listen,’ said Andy. ‘Listen,’ he said, flexing his shoulders as if about to lift some formidable heavy object. ‘Man has always been violent. It’s only for a few years that we ever thought he might not be – and he was still having fuckin wars and shit, Vietnam and that. Violence is innate, so it’s sort of felt selfhood, realized livingness, it’s expressing life in its full creative force – it’s sort of creative to do it.’

  Giles frowned. ‘But what if you just went up to some poor old lady in the street and knocked out her, got her right in the . . .’

  ‘Christ, hippie,’ said Andy, ‘what a crappy example. That’s more like torture or something.’

  Giles frowned. ‘But isn’t what you want . . . anarchy? I mean, what would become of law and policemen and fire-engines and denti—’

  ‘Yeah, well you need all that too,’ said Andy, folding his arms. ‘But if I took you outside now and smacked the shit out of you, don’t tell me you’d go running to the village pig, now, would you?’ Andy leant forward warningly.

  Giles swallowed. ‘No, I promise, Andy.’

  ‘Well then.’

  Those conversations.

  ‘Hey . . . uh, Trip or Flap or whatever the fuck your name is—’

  ‘Skip,’ said Skip.

  ‘Skip. Check. You like fighting and fucking up animals and smashing things up and stuff, don’t you?’

  ‘Sure. Makes you feel good.’

  ‘Check. Marvell, am I wrong?’

  ‘No, you’re not wrong,’ said Marvell.

  ‘Check. Fuckin check.’ Andy sat back and turned haughtily to Giles. ‘O.K.?’

  Giles was a worried man. This sort of talk was all very much in accord with his occasional anxieties about the house, with the air of unreason and casual menace that struck him at odd moments of sobriety: he didn’t know – unpredictable shadows on the stairs, pockets of sourceless, murmured conversation, the feeling you got that no one was really alive there, the sense it gave of being suspended. Giles remembered his terrified awe when he had overheard a speed-racked Andy soliloquize one night about how he was going to slay Mr and Mrs Tuckle . . . ‘Then I’m going to get this fuckin great meat-cleaver,’ Andy had droned to himself, ‘and stuff all these ants and stuff up her snatch. And pull out her teeth with pliers. And staple up her lips. “Ain’t no use you beefing about it, Mr Tuckle. Take a seat, sir, please, whilst I make which the meat hooks.”’ Shudder shudder shudder. Giles had crept back to his room and hadn’t come out of it again for five days.

  ‘Andy,’ he said. ‘If you do decide to hit me, don’t hit me in the face, please. All right? Anywhere, but not in the face. I’ll pay you not to . . .’

  Andy leant forward and tousled Giles’s hair. ‘Don’t worry, chickenshit,’ he said. ‘It’s not your turn yet.’

  ‘Thank you, Andy,’ said Giles, getting up to leave.

  ‘Hey, Andy.’

  ‘Yeah, what do you want, Rip?’

  ‘Skip,’ said Skip.

  ‘Check,’ said Andy.

  ‘Why – how come you didn’t want me to go kick that heifer?’

  ‘What heifer?’

  ‘The heifer yesterday.’

  ‘Oh, the cow. Cos . . . it was all fucked up – and it had attacked us, so you ought to treat it with respeck.’

  ‘I wanted to go fuck it up some more.’

  ‘Well I didn’t want you to, see?’

  ‘I wanted to kill it.’

  Andy gave Skip a hard look. ‘Well, you’d expect that from someone whose dad killed his mum.’

  ‘. . . Pardon me?’

  In the same tone Andy said, ‘You’d expect that from someone whose father killed his mother.’

  The scene changed like a film-cut. Andy was carpeted on his back and Skip straddled his chest, hands white on Andy’s throat.

  ‘Aw – get him—!’

  Providentially Quentin was mulling over some Rousseau in the smaller sitting-room when he heard the struggle. He raced through the dividing doors. With Marvell’s aid he peeled Skip from Andy’s thrashing figure and flattened him on the sofa.

  ‘What’d he say! What’d he say!’ bawled Skip as Marvell ran to the dining alcove. He returned, fumbling with a hypodermic.

  ‘Jesus,’ said Marvell. He eased the needle into Skip’s flapping arm. ‘The fuck, Andy.’

  ‘What’d he say,’ moaned Skip, tears welling from his closed eyes, ‘what’d he say . . .’

  ‘I’d better lay an amnesiac on him too,’ said Marvell through his teeth. Skip’s consciousness died from the room.

  ‘What on earth happened?’ asked Quentin.

  Marvell explained while Andy climbed to his feet. He saw with relief that no one else was present. Moodily he dusted himself down.

  ‘Now all we fuckin need,’ Marvell was saying, ‘is for him to find the letter.’

  ‘The letter?’

  ‘The one from his fuckin father. It’s in our room. I told you about it. It’d wreck his head to see it now.’

  ‘Ah yes, I remember. Give it to me,’ said Quentin, ‘for safe-keeping. I’ll return it before you leave. How fascinating. Tell me—’

  As they conferred, Andy moved over to the sofa, his back to the others. He leant a palm on Skip’s forehead, in the manner of one feeling its temperature. ‘Hope he’s O.K.,’ he muttered. Andy’s voice shook slightly when he said this because he was pinching Skip’s damaged ear with all his might. ‘He’ll pull through,’ said Andy, wiping a bloody thumbnail on Skip’s khaki shirt. ‘I think he’ll pull through O.K.’

  45 The Billet-Doux

  Meanwhile, little Keith was sobbing loudly in the joyful solitude of the back passage. Following this treat, his legs now shooting out in all directions, Whitehead regained his cubicle where, with tweezers, chisel and light hammer, he prised and chipped the blazing shoes from his feet. He sat back against the wall and let out a quiet roar of suppressed pain. Black blood ran down his shins.

  Next to Whitehead on the floor lay the sex-letter, the billet-doux, that he had composed for the delight of Lucy Littlejohn. Keith picked it up and surveyed it without embarrassment. It had, after all, none of the flaws common to such missives; it was not heated, rarefied, florid or imprecise. On the contrary, it was a pedestrian – indeed, in style almost bureaucratic – synopsis of his present plight, with the rider that he would kill himself if Lucy did not alleviate it by sleeping with him. It began ‘Dear Lucy’ and it ended ‘Yours sincerely’.

  ‘“ . . . the sum of nineteen pounds and seventy pence. It is imperative”,’ Keith read out aloud, ‘“that you notify me of your decision within the next twenty-four hours. Thank you. Yours sincerely, Keith (Whitehead)”.’

  ‘That’ll get her going,’ he said, hobbling to his knees. ‘Oh yes, those brackets will get her going.’ He knelt against the bed and joined his hands in an informal attitude of prayer. ‘It’s confidence wins today’s girls,’ he snuffled.

  ‘Please, God,’ he said to himself, ‘don’t let all of this happen to me. It won’t do to let it all happen to one person – to anyone, not just me. I still can’t believe that it all has, really. I suppose it’s that that keeps me going. Oh, great – fabulous. Look, why doesn’t someone just come off it, is what I want to know.’ Keith looked around him. ‘I can’t cope with this.’ Keith looked at his feet; even he was shocked. ‘I’m falling apart here. I can’t cope with this. And who’s doing it all to me, eh? Who?’

  Well, we’re sorry about it, Keith, of course, but we’re afraid that you simply had to be that way. Nothing personal, please understand – merely in order to serve the designs of this particular fiction. In fact, things get much, much worse for you later on, so appallingly bad that you’ll yearn to be back at the Institute, or even in Parky Street, Wimbledon, with that family you so loathe. It’s all too far advanced for us to intercede on your behalf. Tolerate it. You’ll turn out all right in the end. Now go and lie on your bunk.

  Keith lay spread on his bunk – spread like soft butter on warm toast, his body trickling gratefully into the folds of blanket and counterpane. He oozed nearer the wall as he heard female voices from outside. Next to the tobacco tin on his bedside table was a creased manilla envelope. It contained an agitated reminder from the Advanced Dietary Research Commission. Whitehead replaced this with the billet-doux. ‘Ah, fuck it,’ he said, crossing out Kenneth Whitehead and putting, instead, Lucy (Littlejohn).

  46 Wan Windows

  Gazing about himself, Giles found that he was in his bedroom. This appeared to please him in a mild way. He strolled to the refrigerator. He started to hum. He removed from the frosted compartment a tall glass of gin and Southern Comfort, a drink he had not experimented with, nor indeed heard of, before. He even started to whistle. Shadows wandered in from the corners of the room.

  He sipped, and held up the glass to examine it against the light. ‘Hey. This stuff . . .’ He sipped, and held up the glass. ‘This stuff . . . isn’t bad.’ He sipped.

  Half way across the room Giles remembered his daily letter to Mrs Coldstream. He came to a halt and his knees wobbled. An expression of delirious puzzlement overtook his features.

  What did she want him to write, what could have happened today, how could things change still, how could you make it new any more, what was there left to tell her now?

  ‘Dear Mother,’ said Giles. ‘I nearly tripped down the stairs on the way out. Good job I didn’t! Dear Mother, Luigi wasn’t sure of the way back and we had to ask a man in the street. A bit of luck he did! Dear Mother, Everyone was up by the time I got back. High time too! Dear Mother, I get drunk all day. Why? Dear Mother, I’m dying here fast. Dear Teeth, I’m gum the crown drill.’

  Giles sat down at his desk. Languidly he synchronized the jar of 15B pencils, the deck of A4 writing-paper, the eager glass. Fifteen minutes later he had completed a letter full of such typically filial charms as sullenness, torpor, complete want of understanding or sympathy, plainly sarcastic affection, explosive false amusement and clueless self-pity – spread like giant’s graph-readings over eleven airy sides. Giles forced the scroll into an envelope, well pleased with his work. Outside, the afternoon backed off across the hills, causing light to glow on the wan windows of some underwater warehouse or distant farm.

  Gazing about himself, Giles found that he was in his bathroom. This appeared to displease him in a mild way. He felt intimidated by the white porcelain and hard steel. He stared sleepily into the mirror. He didn’t notice that something had been written in shaving-cream across the glass. ‘Heal me, heal me,’ he whispered. Then he noticed. It read Johnny. And then he saw the thing on his basin-side table, the smashed mock-up of his mouth, wet with someone’s snot, saliva and blood. Giles fainted half sideways into the deep carpet.

  47 A Bit Permanent

  ‘You can get used to anything in time, I suppose,’ said Lucy, descending like collapsed taffeta on to the lawn. ‘But I’d better start feeling better soon.’

  ‘Me too,’ said Diana. ‘I feel like a fiend.’

  ‘. . . That’s an awfully nice blouse, Lucy,’ said Celia. ‘Is it Thai silk?’

  ‘Mm. Got it from La Soeur.’

  ‘Christ,’ said Diana. ‘How’d you manage that?’

  ‘Whoring.’

  ‘Whoring,’ echoed Roxeanne. ‘I used to whore out on the Strip. Throat-jobs. The guys used to get really phased because I wouldn’t take any cash.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t you?’ asked Lucy.

  ‘Had plenty cash of my own.’

  ‘What sort of men?’ asked Celia.

  ‘You know, just men. It was part of some project of Marvell’s, I think.’

  ‘That’s smart,’ said Diana. ‘Why did you?’