‘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 Whitehead’s yielding flesh.

  ‘O.K.,’ 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 leant 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 forefinger into his exposed throat.

  A retching quack sprang from Keith’s mouth – as, with no less alacrity, did Andy’s finger.

  ‘AWW! Little fucker bit me!’ shrieked Andy as he leapt 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 enjoy. 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 behaviour 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 colourless 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 alla 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 mid-air, 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 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 friend, 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.

  62 Ghostly Periods

  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 concertina-ed away in unaligned succession. The hall leant back and forth like a sea-borne 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 wouldn’t fit, wouldn’t fit, crags, tors, ridges, beaks, grinding against each other like 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 I 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.

  ‘NO!’

  Hiring every morsel of his strength, Giles cleared the bed and stormed the fridge. His hands were flapping so extravagantly that he had to refill the glass twice before any of the contents forced its way down his throat. When it did, Giles tried very hard to force it out again. No substance that toxic (he felt certain) had ever entered his system before. He lowered his nose to the bottle. It was gin all right – but it smelled as harsh and alien as strong medicine to a delicate child.

  ‘Glug glug glug,’ he said, and added in a voice suddenly panicky with comprehension – ‘. . . Goo goo goo!’

  Within seconds he was out of the door. Behind him the darkness drummed with a thousand mothers.

  This dwarf pleasureless and very mad dream girl nothing flash life has its holiday fair enough? terror and confusion for a four-foot box in a cartoon world of sugary tea crying with shame for each . . . It broke off.

  Whitehead twitched, jolting the back of his skull painfully against a protrusion in the gnarled apple tree. He was alive and he was awake – he even struggled briefly with his bonds. Assuredly Keith was in great pain, but this stemmed from the beating he had received from his housemates rather than from the barbiturates intended for his suicide, which were at present doing him nothing but good, numbing both the retro drug and the punishment his body had recently sustained. He still felt vastly better than he would, say, on an average morning, appreciably trimmer, more wholesome, less corporeal.

  What, nevertheless, was he doing here? At the best of times little Keith’s head was not the most manoeuvrable of units and it was only with great discomfort and travail that he managed to scrape his chins over the stinging ropes about his neck to get a glimpse of the left-hand quarter of the house. All was dark and worryingly quiet. Why, then, had they done this to him? Was he there for fun, for sex, for target-practice? He sensed something flapping against his upper arm, something heavy and metallic. He squinted down and saw the needle-point dangling from his right ‘bicep’; burning his neck, he turned to see its twin dangling from his left.

  – Then he felt his body start to come alive. The soft machinery stirred: winches creaked, pumps groaned, tubes opened, pipes rustled. Keith arched with the effort of containing himself as once again he became a blast-furnace, a forest fire of frantic glands.

  63 The Antidote

  And when the distances went the house was hell at last. Each minute the atmosphere changed radically, boiling up to gas and thinning out to nothing at all. Currents of sweating air slopped through the shrunken rooms. The corridors tapered off into palls of submarine mist. Appleseed Rectory was hell now, and its inhabitants crawled round it with borrowed faces and cancelled eyes. If they kicked against the womb, they folded on to the floor and were sucked down into a hot, thudding sleep.

  – Skip came across Andy sprawled face-down on the stairs. In Andy’s palm was a large red pill, half eroded by perspiration. Skip removed it and popped it into his mouth as he crawled over Andy’s body.

  – Diana knelt in an upstairs cupboard. She searched through old clothes for yesterday’s dolls.

  – Giles crouched beneath the kitchen table. If he heard a noise he would scurry behind the cooker. If he heard a noise he would scurry beneath the kitchen table.

  – Lucy opened her eyes. Marvell was urinating on her legs. She tried to speak and she could not speak.

  – Roxeanne was a starfish on the thick sitting-room cushions. She masturbated caressingly with a chipped hookah-pipe beak.

  – Celia stood upright on the baronial armchair. Through her tears came snatches of forgotten nursery rhymes.

  Now Quentin awoke in the empty hall. He climbed to his knees, holding his head between clenched fists. When his eyes opened to the bruised light he needed all his will to focus them on the fast-escaping outlines. He reeled to the nearest wall and pressed his forehead hard against the cold stone. Inhaling deeply, he summoned his body and his mind.

  Quentin found Marvell in the washroom, alone, giggling softly into a pile of soiled underclothes.

  Quentin picked Marvell up by the hair and slammed him furiously against the door.

  Marvell’s eyes stared.

  ‘The antidote,’ said Quentin clearly. ‘The antidote. You’ve got five minutes. Do it, Marvell. Or I’ll kill you.’

  64 High Tea, or Here We Go Again

  Enough? Have we had enough? Nothing would be easier, of course, than to give the Americans some food, some sleep even, and pack them off – that would appear to get rid of Johnny, and, why, they could even drop little Keith at the hospital on the way. Might be some bother there but, on the whole – yes – it would demand small ingenuity to restore peace to Appleseed Rectory. Unfortunately, though, there is no ‘going back’ on things that in a sense were never meant, things that got started too long ago. These things go on. It isn’t over. It hasn’t begun.

  Two-thirty and high tea was served at the Appleseed kitchen in a mood of buzzing, ravenous hilarity. Sipping chilled Hock and a light Mateus Rosé, they negotiated vast stacks of toast and Gentlemen’s Relish, cucumber and cress sandwiches, water-biscuits spread with celery salt and avocado paste. Celia was still sad about The Mandarin (whom Quentin promised elaborately to bury the next day), but otherwise there was little to regret because there was little to remember. The only sure recollection, they had was of an experience of almost vibrant fear coupled with something more numinous, the nudge of a deeper act of memory, a spiritual strain that had filled them all with an exquisite and gentle anguish. They felt like ocean divers after a fascinating and perilous expedition, or, more appropriately, like safely disembarked astronauts who, amid the populous celebrations, were quietly aware that they had known the full pain and tragic isolation of space.

  Then Andy dropped his plate with a clatter and got suddenly to his feet. ‘Little Keith!’ he said. ‘What happened to little Keith?’

  ‘Oh, Christ,’ said Diana as the boys sped from the room, ‘here we go again.’

  In the pewter light from the garage it seemed as if the apple tree had grown a second stump, a squat and knobbled extension at its base.

  Skip looked at Marvell. ‘Jesus. You think he’s still alive?’

  ‘Andy?’

  ‘Don’t ask me, squire,’ said Andy. ‘I’m fucked if I’m going near him while he smells like that.’

  Quentin buried his nose in a perfumed handkerchief.

  ‘He twitched then,’ said Marvell, adding more quietly, ‘I think he twitched then.’

  ‘How will we ever know?’ said Quentin through his sudary.

  Andy snapped his fingers. ‘Got it! The hose. Come on, Quent, give us a hand,’ he said happily. ‘Like I always maintain – you can do anything once you put your mind to it.’

  The hose used at Appleseed Rectory had been bought second-hand, on Andy’s suggestion, from the Municipal Fire Department Warehouses in Catford, S.E.5. Although of limited utility in the garden – it did not irrigate so much as void any bed on which it was trained – only a heavy-duty implement, Andy had argued, would be equal to such routine domestic tasks as local-yob suppression, Tuckle intimidation, and so on. (Andy pooh-poohed the objection that pressurizing the tap would cost Giles £2,000, and Giles had stuck up for him.) The mouth of the hose had a diameter of four inches. Experiments had shown that it could flatten a villager from twenty-five yards.

  At a little under a third of that distance from Keith, Andy now stood with his restless legs planted wide apart. His right hand was held aloft, while his left gripped the hose’s heavy snout. Then Andy chopped his raised arm through the air. ‘Now!’ he yelled.

  As the first pole of water hit him in the face, Keith’s ragged, wobbling figure found its contours and, as Andy played the hose up and down his body, the slumped form seemed actually to dance free of its bonds. Six minutes later Andy’s right arm chopped through the air once more. ‘Right!’ he said. ‘That oughta handle it.’

  In a loose semicircle, Andy, Quentin, Skip and Marvell warily approached the tree.

  Quentin and Marvell looked at each other in candid horror.

  ‘Mm. On second thoughts maybe I should have backed off some with the hose,’ said Andy, himself noticing the new orange blood that had started to well from Keith’s mouth, nose and eyes.

  Marvell felt for Whitehead’s still-vibrating wrist. ‘He’s still there ! It’s faint, but he’s still there!’

  ‘Onna other hand,’ said Andy, ‘it was probably just what he needed. A good jolt. Just the job.’

  ‘Cut him down, Skip,’ said Marvell.

  When Skip had severed the last of the ropes, Keith fell forward like a thick plank into the mud created by the broad wash of the hose. Except for the thin leather belt he was virtually naked, his dressing-gown torn away by the force of the water; the remains of his clothes stuck to his white body in thin damp strings.

  ‘Wotcher reckon, Marv?’ asked Andy.

  Marvell took out his hypodermic wallet and knelt on the grass. ‘I’ll plug some meth up his ass. Then we’d better walk him around some.’

  ‘Check. I’ll just give him one more go with the hose. Now we’ve got the bloody thing out. Just to clean him up. Don’t want all that mud on our hands.’

  ‘Mud? Oh, yeah, right.’

  ‘Is he O.K.?’ called Lucy from the french windows.

  ‘Keith?’ said Andy. ‘He’s laughing.’

  65 Seems Silly Now

  When Lucy came back into the sitting-room, Giles was standing by the door, looking tense.

  ‘They say Keith’s O.K.’

  ‘. . . Oh. Good.’

  ‘What is it, Giles?’

  ‘Lucy, a friend of mine wants me to ask you something.’

  ‘Which friend?’

  ‘Just a friend.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘A friend,’ said Giles.

  ‘Yes, I’m with you. What does he want to know?’

  ‘My friend wants to know if you could ever – if you could marry someone who didn’t have any – if he had . . .’