Dead Babies Read Online Free Page A

opens a magazine as the airplane accelerates along the runway.
    And Whitehead? Thirteen years of age, Keith is at present : the subject of experimental (and, in the event, deleterious) gland-correction surgery in the Research Wing of the St. Pancras Hospital for Tropical Diseases. Since the age of five Whitehead has had always to observe a starvation diet to avoid grotesque obesity; with adolescence has come an explosion of fatty tissue, a hormonal influx that has alarmed even the most experienced of the hospital's dieticians. His three-strong, seventy-stone family trudges along two evenings a week; it sits and swears at Keith for half an hour ("The operation will be a complete bloody disaster, you realize," foretells Whitehead, Sr., enviously), then trudges off again, without good-byes. Little Keith excited so much revulsion in the public wards that the consultants were forced to move him into a private room. He will be discharged in five weeks' time; the doctors will pronounce him more fat-prone than ever but "as sane as can be expected." For the time being, Whitehead lies in pulsing, hot-faced, glandular silence by day and at night is the weeper of unreflecting tears.
These are the six that answer to our purposes, and we have taken them on ahead a small distance in time to Appleseed Rectory, a three-story structure which stands in the outskirts of the Hertfordshire village of Gladmoor. Gladmoor is still a village. It has survived the northern thrust of the London suburbs partly because of its inconvenient remoteness from the main intercity highways and partly because of its taxing proximity to the Luton Airport approach routes. Gladmoor has been conserved too, perhaps, by its capacity to astonish: straying down the one gray-brick road, seeing the wonky Edwardian streetlamps, the warped and splintery sign over the coach house, the great oaks which bend back toward the hills, visitors find it hard to expunge the sense of unreality, of suspension, which even the drumming aircraft cannot break, an aura of peace and sweetness almost as palpable as the integrity of the stone.
Approaching Appleseed Rectory from the direction of the village could be a particularly dislocating experience. When Quentin had sent directions to his American friends, for example, he had written: "Immediately after the hump-backed bridge, stop, get out of the car, and look hard to your left, and the house is inset twenty yards from the road. It's there!" With good reason: it was commonplace for regular callers at DEAD BABIES; 2O
    the house to speed down the road past it, U-turn, miss it again, and oblige garrulous locals to redirect them. Appleseed Rectory always seemed to be the color of the sky against which it was set. The off-white brick made it look like something in a monochrome photograph, or like a painting glimpsed through net curtains. It was exceptionally narrow, windowless at either end, and seen from the road it would sometimes melt back to a bodiless shimmer. In hot weather the sun would draw thermal gradients from the roadside stream, corrugating the house like an image on a rippling banner. On rainy afternoons it would appear completely to recede into the vaporous, hospital-gray medium of the sky.
And inside the house itself perspective seems no less unreliable. Everyone is always blacking out at Appleseed Rectory, and they can't remember farther back than a few days. Everyone tends to be either drunk or stoned or hungover or sick at Appleseed Rectory, and they have learned to be empirical about all sense perceptions. Everything is out of whack at Appleseed Rectory; its rooms are without bearing and without certainty. The inhabitants suffer, too, from curious mental complaints brought on by prolonged use of drugs, complaints that can be alleviated only by drugs of different kinds. And so Appleseed Rectory is a place of shifting outlines and imploded vacuums; it is a place of lagging time and false memory, a place of street sadness, night