"Will it be all right, darling?"
Quentin Villiers lay back in his seat, exhaling huge rings of resinous smoke. He nodded slowly as the Universal lights began to go down.
Out onto the stage sidled a spectacularly deformed old man, a hand wrapped like a flannel over his dented forehead. Squaring up to the mike, he thanked all those who had been kind enough to look in at the Psychologic Revue that night and was sorry to have to inform them that the anticipated artistes, Neural Lobe, had regrettably been unable to keep their booking and that he hoped he would not be letting everyone down when he said that he had persuaded Acey-Deecey and his band to stand in for them tonight. He rolled his eyes haggardly at the audience and reversed through the velvet curtains, which swept grandly open.
Twenty minutes later the Universal was getting heavy. Acey-Deecey, a pensionable cabaret performer, had proved to be fat, ill-rehearsed, drunk, and entirely lacking in all the at-: tributes of showmanship. As he told long, unfunny jokes, thrummed on the piano, and danced with wonky corpulence, he had become aware that his audience was by no means a captive one, and so began to simulate an even more toe-curling pathos, recounting his long history of failure, telling of previous flops with a forgiving smile, simpering into the microphone about his obesity, lack of rehearsing time, alcoholism, etc. The auditorium wheezed and bawled.
"But here's perhaps one song I can sing," Acey was saying, prune-eyed. "A song that perhaps I've got the right to sing. It was made famous by a very wonderful lady who was dead before any of you were born. It's called 'Nobody Knows You,' and it's the blues, and it goes something like this. "
("They're trying to do the embarrassment routine again," drawled Quentin. "It's meant to be this bad, but no one gets embarrassed any more — embarrassment has gone. Surely they know that.")
"Once I lived the life of a millionaire," sang the old man, nodding his head raptly at his paunch. "Spent all my money, didn't have a care. Takin' all my friends out for a—"
And his voice was a horrible, dislocating thing, without body, shape, or feeling, a nerveless skirl that seemed to empty the air around it. The audience shrank back in appalled silence.
". bootleg liquor, champagne and wine. Till I began to fall so low, didn't have a penny, had—"
Then it happened. The two tall men from the front row had leaped the orchestra pit and were on the stage. Almost before his last words were out, Acey was on his knees with his hair pulled back — and the man had smacked him in the throat with the iron glove. A rope of blood jumped from his mouth. Then he eye-forked him with a popping sound and dug his boot into Acey's groin, making his legs spring up and flutter. The man wrenched his head from behind until a long sick crack folded out onto the stunned air.
The audience was motionless with italic terror.
"But Concep— They don't—" gibbered Andy, as the man ground his boot into Acey's face and it split like a waterlogged pumpkin. They stood panting over his broken body.
It wasn't until Acey had got to his feet, peeled back the sopping mask, and, flanked by the two "Conceptualists," given a deep bow that the audience made any reaction at all. Some whimpered, some emitted quiet, retrospective screams, some cried with relief, everyone gasped, and a few applauded. Slow with adrenalin, the audience shuffled toward the exit doors.
"Not bad. Not bad," said Marvell.
"Yeah," said Skip.
"I'm glad it amused you," said Quentin.
"A drag it wasn't for real," said Roxeanne.
"How did they do it," said Celia.
"Quite simple," said Diana.
"Thought I was going to be sick, actually. But then it all seemed a long way away," said Giles.
"Did you enjoy it, Lucy?" said Keith.
"Sorry, I can't hear you," said Lucy.
"Christ. To think that was supposed to be a gesture! That! They really had me worried for a moment — I thought they really were Conceptualists!" said Andy.
26: THE LUGUBRIOUS BOOGIE
"You a pig," wept the lugubrious boogie. "You all pigs."
Round the sackcloth table at the far end of a scotch-room alcove in the bowls of an alcoholic concourse beneath the bistro mezzanines of an eat-and-drink complex of an amenity estate north of Euston Station, the Appleseeders sat nursing half a dozen cork flasks of para-natural whiskey. ("And now some low life," Quentin had said, coughing into his perfumed handkerchief.) Incapacitated Irishmen, morose Mediterraneans, taciturn blacks, bronchitic prostitutes, and vomiting immigrant workers lined the scotch-room benches, being served whiskeys of varying sizes by unsmiling young men in pre-faded denim jumpsuits.
The lugubrious boogie placed his neck against the low bare-brick wall. "Pigs," he gasped.
Roxeanne moved closer to him and took his curled hand. "Why, man? Tell me why. Tell me why we're pigs."
"You all pigs."
"Forget it, Rox," called Andy from the other side of the table. "He's a mess. Drunk and all fucked up. No use talking to them when they're — what the hell do you know, you dumb boogie.”
: Roxeanne was not discouraged. Skip leaned over and droned quietly into Andy's ear, "Roxeanne has a thing for coons."
"What kind of thing?"
"A fuck-thing."
"With him? With that? He has to be thirty-five."
"Don't matter," said Skip.
"Pigs."
"Look — hey — boogie," shouted Andy, "better get the fuck out of here, boy, okay? You're all fucked up and got nothing to say."
"We're not like that," said Roxeanne; "he doesn't mean it," she told the lugubrious boogie, pressing his hand against her hard breasts.
"Oh yes I do," said Andy. "Beat it, boogie, and I mean now."
" 'Boogie'?" queried Marvell. "Jesus, this guy talks more American than I do. Haven't heard "boogie" for a time. Say that in New York, Andy, and you'll get your head kicked off."
"I don't give a rat's arse. Because I wouldn't say it in New York. I respect and admire the American black. They fight. But over here they're just boogies far as I'm concerned."
A rank of nearby blacks straightened their heads, as if they might take issue with Andy on this point. Andy glared happily at them.
"You know," mused Giles to nobody in particular, "I thought I wasn't going to enjoy tonight, but I quite am, actually. Not once have I thought about my. " (Villiers extended a hand to refill Giles's beaker.)
Whitehead sat close to Lucy, achingly, illegally close. He noticed, with what he felt to be some impertinence, that her breasts were rather long and tubular beneath her virile white shirt— nothing like the trim conclavities of Diana's breasts nor the global fury of Roxeanne's. Nicer than Celia's, though; more touching somehow. He noticed too that her face was a bit colorless, for all its sequins and cosmetic murals, and her mouth somewhat puckered, but not testily so. Little Keith felt a kind of spurious intimacy with her. If only she wouldn't dislike him — never mind anything else yet.
"Have you ever been in here before, Lucy?"
(Did one bother with that sort of thing these days? Whitehead assembled and compressed his buttocks, thus increasing his sitting height by a couple of inches.) "No. Have you.? Sorry, what's your name?" (Her face was blank — but Keith could scarcely credit the solicitude of her manner.) "Keith."
"Keith? You're the one who.? Oh, Andy." (And she smiled at him! At Whitehead! Without a whisper of ridicule in her face.)
"No, Lucy, I haven't either. It's interesting — all these different views. I think Roxeanne's on the right track really with. that man. Though you can see Andy's point of view. What do you make of it?"