Dead Babies Read Online Free Page B

fatigue, and canceled sex.
More in a moment.
    6: fat chance
Keith was still wallowing on the sofa in the smaller Rectory sitting room when Quentin and Andy appeared in the doorway. Ten o'clock, Friday morning.
"It's drug time!" Andy announced.
"Oh, God," said Keith.
    One among many of Whitehead's domestic posts was that of drug-tester. Two or three times a week Andy and Quentin would approach him with a pill, or a scrap of blotting paper, or a sac of powder, or a vial of fluid, or a sachet of crystals, or a moist sugar lump, which Keith would then be required to swallow or suck or sniff or (occasionally) inject. Quentin and Andy would tell him how long they expected the drug to take and would disappear for that period. On their return Keith would either be giggling and leaping about, or shaking his head and saying, "Nothing yet," or shivering with terror beneath the sideboard, or enjoying agreeable hallucinations, or asleep, or crying, or cleaning the kitchen, or locked in the broom closet, or vomiting crazily, or unconscious and very white. Sometimes, if the effects of the drug seemed to be irresistibly efficacious, Quentin and Andy would personally join Keith in the experiment. If the converse, they would take seats and, in a spirit of detached inquiry, watch; they would note how little Keith's pupils bulged and throbbed, discuss the way in which he would twitch and pant, observe how, in the final stages, his skin paled, his tongue went lizard-green, and his lips gashed gold-vermilion.
"Nothing very special today," Andy went on. "Just a pound for three from the black guy in the canteen. He's pretty reliable—for a Pakky—so it should be quite mild and won't last long."
"Up or down?" asked Keith warily.
Andy glanced at Quentin and said, "Down. But not far." His brisk manner returned. "Pins-and-needly feeling after half an hour or so—we think—then you ought to feel a bit sleepy, dizzy, queasy—but nice. A thing of the past within a couple of hours."
Whitehead narrowed his eyes. "No side-effects?"
"Absolutely not."
"It doesn't make your piss go all black like that stuff the other week?"
"Uh-uh."
"I won't have all that green gunge coming out of my ears?"
"Promise."
"I won't be up all night trying to crap?"
"No way."
"And, look, they don't make your cock retract like that powdered stuff you—"
"Actually," digressed Andy, "one guy's eyes came out on
stalks when I hit him with some bad MDA, and his tongue went all—”
"Are you sure they don't muck up your cock, because I ..." Keith stirred in his seat, settling on his buttocks as if they were cushions. "When's Lucy coming?"
"Lucy? Who knows?" said Quentin, appealing to Andy.
"Sometime this evening." Andy's gaze steadied. "Why?"
Whitehead sat up straight. "I'll give you three guesses!"
Quentin and Andy regarded each other uneasily. For Keith had said this in one of his "funny voices," an Americanized treble, as it might be Jiminy Cricket challenging Pinocchio with some pedagogic taunt.
"What?" said Andy.
"Cos I want some of the old dippy-dippy-dippy!"
Keith smiled at the silence as his words swung out into the room and hovered in the air above the round glass table. Each of them simultaneously became aware of a lone bird gurgling doggedly somewhere among the branches that swathed the sitting room windows.
"Dippy-dippy?" said Andy.
Keith strove on in a precarious Yogi Bear falsetto: "Dippy-dippy—the old in-out, in-out—dunking the dagger—some of the other—a bit of the old . . ." Whitehead trailed off.
Andy looked at Quentin again.
"Does he mean fucking, or what?"
"That's right," said Keith defeatedly, in his normal voice.
"Fucking Lucy?" asked Quentin.
"Mm. That's right. I only thought . . ."
Just then the telephone peeped and Quentin swayed across the room to answer it.
Andy joined Keith on the sofa. "Well, why the fuck didn't you say so, Keith?" Andy's tone grew earnest. "Keith, listen."
"What?"
"Don't ever speak in that voice again. Okay?"
"Okay."
"Christ, Keith.