"Good morning to you, Mrs. Fry," said Quentin. "How may we assist you?"
"Just want the mops, Mr. Villiers, thank you." There was a silence. Mrs. Fry stared at Quentin for a moment with what might have been appalled desire then barged past Keith's "outstretched" legs toward the broom closet. A smell of Domestos, baby powder, and aged sweat flew up into the air.
Whitehead looked at Mrs. Fry askance, largely due to the fact that he had made a highly unsuccessful pass at her the month before. Keith had been lying on his bunk, wondering what use to put to the early morning erection which he so painfully nursed, considering whether to reach down for a handful of the magazines that glistened beneath his bunk. Mrs. Fry had called from the garage that she wanted access to the brushes stored in his room. Whitehead bade her enter and, when she knelt down with her back to him, leaned forward in hot pajamas to cup the gauzy pink bosom of her apron. Mrs. Fry turned around and hit little Keith so hard on his right ear that he immediately burst out crying — not out of shock or frustration, merely from the pain.
"Got everything, Mrs. Fry?"
"Yes, thank you, Mr. Villiers." She smiled to reveal false teeth of perfect whiteness. " 'Scuse!" she hooted at Keith, who smartly wedged his legs under the chair.
: "Fuck," said Andy absentmindedly to himself, adjusting his heavy groin with both hands, "these jeans don't half get to your snake."
"Allow me," said Quentin, holding open the door past which Mrs. Fry disappeared. Quentin turned to Andy. "Well, I think you showed admirable restraint, Andy." There was perhaps the tiniest hint of real disapproval in his voice?
"Mm? Oh, that," said Andy. "The fuck, she just licks the floors around here." Anger returned to him like a jolt of electricity. He swooped down once again on little Keith, "Nothing? Not even dazed, hazy, not with it, vague, loose—"
Keith, who had protruded his lower lip ominously from the word "hazy" on, said, "Not a thing, Andy."
Andy shook his head as if to clear it. He started back, spun round full circle, and returned his gaze imploringly to Keith. "Take two more. Take four more. Take—"
"Slow down, Andy," said Quentin. "You've just been burnt, that's all."
"You'd better not be fucking with me," Andy told Keith hopefully.
"They just don't work, Andy."
"That fuckin' boogie!" Andy began to windmill his arms in incredulous rage. "Jesus! 'Yey, man, is forking good, be my fren, forking con your ass.' Forty pounds!" Andy took the flat, one-ounce tobacco tin out of his pocket and crashed it on the table, over which it slid to belly-rattle on the kitchen floor. Andy straightened, and said with abrupt calm, "I'm going to go beat him up. Coming?"
"Yes, I'll just get my coat," said Quentin. "Keith, if Celia asks tell her I shan't be more than twenty minutes."
"What are you intending to do to him, Andy," asked Keith when Quentin had left the room.
Andy held up a large-knuckled, many-ringed fist. "Either he's going to give me my money back and all the drugs I can carry or I'm going to kick the absolute shit out of him. I tell you, he's going to be one sorry boogie when I… Quentin!"
Andy's motorbike snarled into life. Keith heard the door shut again, the motorbike letting go with a whirl of gravel,
and the gears changing eagerly as it raced down the village
street. With slightly agitated movements Keith leaned to retrieve the tin of pills, which he snapped open. He stared at its contents for several seconds.
9: Gin and tears
"Glug glug glug," whispered Giles to himself, swirling the lime juice in its prefrosted beaker and holding it up to the light. "Glug glug glug glug glug."
Seen from outside his window Giles Coldstream might have been mistaken for a crazy scientist were it not for the amiable blandness of his face. The desk over which he was hunched was a fizzing, gargling laboratory of martini shakers, electric stirrers, corkscrews, siphons, ice buckets, glass coolers, lemon peelers, spoons.
Without taking his eyes from the misted beaker Giles reached out gropingly with his right hand until it settled on the lumpy green bottle of Gordon's gin, which he then unscrewed, upturned, and frowned at. "Ah. Empty," he said.
Giles sauntered the length of the room, opened the double doors of his vast teak drinks cupboard, selected a bottle of gin from the off-license-sized rank on the top shelf, and returned to his desk. Giles filled the tall beaker almost to the brim, adding, by way of an afterthought, scolding himself for his forgetfulness, a squirt of tonic. He sipped quizzically. "Delicious." Giles sipped again, more candidly this time, and ambled back to the bed. A creased Penguin of Iris Murdoch's The Black Prince, the tale of a sixty-year-old man's romance with a twenty-year-old girl, lay open on his pillow. He read a few more pages before disappointment at Miss Murdoch's continual shirking of the question of the protagonists' difference in teeth caused him to toss the book scathingly under his bed. "You can't 'suspend disbelief forever," he remarked. From the pile of hardbacks which The Black Prince joined— Teeth, Oral Hygiene: The Facts, The History of the Denture, A Dentist's Day, The Tooth—our good Giles selected one at random and sank with foreboding into the deep pillows.
Twenty pages later there was a firm rap on his bedroom door. "Giles?"
He peered woefully over his book. "Yes?" "Telephone." "Who is it, actually?" "Some old woman." "No. I meant outside the door. Who are you?”
: "Celia."
"Ah. Now Celia — couldn't you just sort of—"
"What? Look—" Celia fought with the handle. " — I can't—"
"Hang on." Giles swung his body off the bed and toddled over to the door, whose three bolts he threw back and which he opened a few millimeters.
When Giles saw Celia he screamed.
"Gosh, sorry about that," he said afterward. "I didn't really recognize you." Celia had a lardlike cream pack on her face and had brushed her hair out tangentially from her big square head. She looked like an anemic golliwog. "Look, um, uh. " Giles snapped his fingers weakly.
"Celia."
"Celia. Look — Celia — it may be my mother. In fact, it is. Do you think you could very kindly tell her I'm ill?"
"No, I'm afraid I couldn't. I've already told her you're well."
"I see. Am I right in thinking you've got a telephone in your room? May I take it in there?"
Celia swiveled and after a moment's hesitation Giles followed her across the landing.
"What's happened to your telephone?"
"I cut the wire," said Giles, not without pride.
Celia preceded him into the room and pointed to the telephone on the windowseat. "Whatever for?" she asked.
"The sudden ringing gives me such a fright sometimes. I thought I might fall over one of these days and knock out. "
Giles was going to say "some teeth," but he fell silent, blank and becalmed in the doorway.
"Well, you'd better answer it now you're here."
"Oh! Thank you. Celia."
Celia repaired to her dressing table. She took up the hairbrush with a roll of her eyes. "You stink of gin, you know."
"Do I?" asked Giles, faintly intrigued. "No, I didn't know that." Giles then gave Celia one of his smiles, which is to say he compressed and elongated his lips. "Hello? Mother? Oh, hello. This is Giles here. I'm very well, indeed, thank you
— awfully well. Ah, no, now, today isn't a good day, actually.
Oh, I've got lots of things I must do. Jolly busy indeed. And tomorrow, do you see, is Sunday, and one can't very well— If it were Saturday tomorrow then nothing would be simpler than to… Are you sure?" Giles muffled the receiver and looked up groggily at Celia. "Today wouldn't be Friday, would it? Oh, dear." He contemplated the telephone unhappily. "What? Yes, mother, you were right. Saturday it is then. Perfect. Well! I suppose I shall be along to see you then. Good-bye. And I love you."