"Bastards," he said. "Deaf, dumb, blind fucking bastards." He turned and began to stride back toward the house.
"Andy …"
Andy spun toward the garage. It was an impossible sound, like an animal or a wounded baby.
"Andy."
It was inches away. Andy looked down suddenly — and saw him through the tiny window slot of his room, his face lit by a crack of wan upstairs light.
"Keith?"
"Andy. I've done it. I'm dying."
Celia stood outside the sitting-room door. She was trembling with almost theatrical violence. "Quentin!" she shouted. "Quentin!"
The door opened. "Darling.?"
She seemed to collapse in his arms but then jarringly drew back. He reached out to her. "Darling, darling. Ah now, ah now."
She backed away. "Come here," she said, leading him up the stairs. "There's something you must see. There's something you must know. Something everyone must know. Now."
"Darling, what is this? My dearest, you're. "
She halted on the landing and held up her hands to silence him. "Listen. There's— Someone's. There's excrement in our bed. In our bed."
"How unutterably squalid."
Celia shuddered and he moved closer. "Don't. Just listen. It is not human excrement. There are. it's got other things in it — the smell is quite foul — I don't know what they are. It's sort of alive."
He followed her into their room. Celia walked to the bed, turned toward him and lifted the top sheet. He gagged softly through his raised palm. "Like essense of human being," he said. They gathered the sheet by its corners, folding it double, double again, and double again.
"You see, darling, don't you," said Celia, "that it's all changed now. That we must do something. If we don't then nothing will mean anything any more. Everything will be mad if we don't. If we go downstairs now and pretend this hasn't happened — what'll we be then?"
"You're right, of course, darling."
"We'll just have to go down there and find out what's going on."
"Yes."
They embraced quickly. He picked up the folded sheet. They were about to move toward the door when sounds of clamor came from below. Then Andy's voice rattled cheerfully up the stairs: "Hey, Quent! Better get along, Mac. Little Keith's dying on us here!"
Dropping the sheet into the laundry basket he hurried from the room. Celia watched him go with a hard face. She knew that she had lost then.
59: something to do
It was by no means the paradox it may at first appear that the news of Whitehead's forthcoming death saw an infusion of coltish high spirits into Appleseed Rectory. It signaled, for one thing, the end of what Dr. Marvell Buzhardt was later
to call "the slipway factor," which invariably obtained when
the retrodrug took hold, and the Appleseeders' vertiginous slide into their own insecurities was wonderfully lightened by the more graphic and spectacular sufferings of the dying: boy, who now sat on the baronial sitting-room club armchair, with a full male audience gathered round his swilling dressing gown. And was Keith himself going to throw a dampener on their good cheer? Not a bit of it. Whitehead had never felt better in his life.
"Okay," said Andy, rubbing his hands together. "Now the way I see it is: we got to keep the little bastard from having a fit or blacking out or whatever. Check?"
"Obviously we can't involve the authorities," murmured Villiers.
"We could, we could make him throw up a lot," said Skip.
"Yeah," said Marvell. "Dump him in the fuckin' bath. Boiling water. Liter of gin. Make him drink fuckin' all of it."
"I've done that myself," said Giles. "It makes you feel awful."
"I'm not pregnant you know," said Keith huffily, folding his arms. "I mean, not one of you has even asked me what I took yet."
"Oh yeah," said Andy with a snort of laughter. "That's a point. Okay, Keith — wotcher take?"
"The eighty downers you gave me yesterday morning."
"Gave. downer—? But they didn't work."
"Oh yes they did. I tricked you."
Andy sat back. "Fuck me," he said.
"What were they, Andy?" asked Marvell in a forensic tone, reaching for a ballpoint and pad. Stumblingly Andy told him. Marvell listened, nodded, and said to Keith, "Boy, you're very nearly dead. In twenty minutes or so you're gonna want to go to sleep; if you do, you're fucked. We better get that stuff out of you. If we don't you're gonna be on your feet. All night. Rox, bring me the brandy— I'd better monkey with it. Cos we're gonna be too."
" 'It is imperative,'" Lucy read out, " 'that you notify me of your decision within the next twenty-four hours. Thank you. Yours sincerely, Keith (Whitehead).' "
"See what I mean?" said Celia.
"Mm. Pretty sexy stuff. Can really turn a phrase. Celia, it hardly compares with 'Johnny's' letter to Diana." She held up the second piece of paper. "What's a 'perineum,' by the way?"
"The bit between your cunt and your bum," said Diana.
"Ah."
"Listen," said Celia. "Keith's been to an asylum; we also know he's been very ill — something to do with his stomach, so he could have" — she gestured sideways at the laundry basket—"and now this. He's obviously in a desperate—"
"Come on, Celia," Lucy said jovially, "don't be so silly! If Keith was Johnny he wouldn't. Keith just wouldn't do things like that. Honestly! Poor little bugger— he was in my room half of last night wondering how to give me a good-night kiss. He may be a bit looney — I mean, wouldn't you be? — but he wouldn't— you know."
Lucy appealed to Diana. The three of them were sitting in Celia's room, Lucy and Celia on the stripped bed, while Diana draped the adjacent sofa. All three were drinking liberally from the double-liter of tequila which Lucy had recently fetched from Giles's (by now untended) alcoholic archives. As with the men, the new crisis seemed to have presented them with at least a handful of transient certainties, a focus for their loosening minds, something to do.
Celia said, "Diana thinks it's Skip, I know. I thought it was Marvell for a bit, but I can't see what possible—"
"But, darling, it's got to be," said Lucy. "It's too frightening if it isn't." She sipped her tequila, spluttering slightly as she remembered another thing to add. "Mm — and someone called Johnny did something nasty to Giles this afternoon. He wouldn't tell me what but he was very jumpy and everything. He just came up and asked me which of the Yanks was called Johnny. He was quite flabbergasted that one of them wasn't."
"But don't you think," said Celia, "that Keith— I mean what those boys did to him. And Roxeanne and everything."
"Celia! You said yourself that you found it while Keith was upstairs."
"Oh, I don't know. I just want it to be over." Celia's eyes clouded and she reached for a paper tissue. "Can't it just be over?"
"If it was Keith it would be." Lucy moved to the window, drawn by the sounds from below. "Keith's out of action now. No. It's worse than Keith." She swiveled, hooking her elbows
backward on the sill. As she returned Celia's gaze the two
girls became aware that Diana had withdrawn from the conversation, had indeed withdrawn her presence from the room. "Diana?" they both asked.
: Diana tried to say something but the words were submerged. She sat up — no, she was slipping back, slipping back to… to cry again and please the black road as intensely sad fireflies winking to a thickening presence of dew and sleeping bags in the starched chill of night fatigue every day lassitude and disgust from the pink retreat it's brief and pleasureless being alone without knowing why letters a day in hanging-garden avenues the first of many summers the time it is hating everything time wondering Diana.