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 rose, 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 knobbed 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 handkerchief.
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 secondhand, on Andy's suggestion, from the municipal fire department warehouses in Catford, SE5. 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 had 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 thought 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 okay?" 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 okay."
". 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. " "If he had what?”
: "No, that's the point — if he didn't have… if he had. if he didn't have. "
"If he didn't have what, then?"
'If he didn't have… if he had. "
"Say it, Giles. Christ."
"Well, you see, what my cousin wants to know, actually, is could you marry someone who had. who didn't have. "
"Jesus. WHAT?"
"Who didn't have teeth. Who had false ones. Could you?"
"If I loved him, of course I could!"
Giles sank against the door. "Gosh. I never thought I should marry," he said to steady himself.
Giles poured out a glass of Hock and said to Roxeanne, "They say Keith is well again."
Roxeanne said that she thought he probably would be. "You can get away with most things these days."
Celia stood up and, with Diana's assistance, began to load the dishwasher. "Well," she said, "if he is he's going to have to find somewhere else to live."
"Right," said Diana. "I've got no time for suicides. It's just too boring. A schoolfriend of mine was in a crash once and I went to see her every day for three months. A year later the bitch stuck her head in the oven because her guy couldn't kick being queer. Did I go to the hospital once? No way. I told her why not, too."
"I agree," said Celia. "It's selfish, stupid, and utterly boring."
"Well," said Giles. "I don't know, I just feel. That drug and everything… I just feel terribly relieved."
And then Giles Coldstream did something he had not done for five years. He turned full face to Roxeanne and he smiled — not his habitual tragicomic-mask, thin-lipped stripe, but a bright, frank, boyish, ripple-eyed grin.
Roxeanne leaned forward sharply and frowned up at him. "Hey, man, what's with your teeth? They're all, you got wires and shit in there—"
Upending his glass and knocking his chair over, Giles backed away from the table, his face stunned with a look of guilty dismay.
"Here, let's. " said Roxeanne, bearing down on Giles, who retreated gesturing with his hands like an entertainer quelling applause. "The fuck, how old are you? And your teeth are all dead."