‘Which one d’you fancy?’ he breathed.
‘I hardly know. Haven’t taken them in yet.’
‘Do you like Anastasia?’
‘Anastasia?’ This could not be. ‘What’s her real name?’ I implored.
‘Jean.’
‘Oh. The short-arse? Yeah, she’s all right. Boring dress.’
‘Mm. Good body, though.’
‘Have you fucked her?’
‘Sort of. She’s not as good as Sue.’
‘Have you fucked Sue?’
‘Sort of. She’s got better tits.’
‘What do you mean, “sort of’?’
‘We had this vague Troy.’
‘No. Christ how sexy. What was it like?’
‘Yeah, they’re dikes, too. It was okay, except I couldn’t get a proper rise. Too Mandied.’
‘Why doesn’t that sort of thing ever happen to me?’
Geoffrey swayed on his pegs. ‘Because you’re a country bumpkin and I’m a city slicker.’
We talked drugs. Geoffrey had dropped two Mandrax; there was also some hash, but this was of only minor interest to the bronchitic narrator. I got a Mandrax off him to take later. My chest was telling me not to get any ideas about sleeping tonight.
That evening Mr and Mrs Entwistle laid on their very first row. It opened modestly enough. Geoffrey and I were back in the kitchen, helping to clear up. Door slams full force, missing-link footsteps, Norman’s head bulges hugely into the room; seeing no one else, its albino eyes fix on Jenny. We froze, as in a television advertisement. Then he was gone, and Jenny, scooping up cigarettes and lighter, had gone after him.
‘Heavy,’ murmured Geoffrey.
My stage designs for Rachel were not entirely wasted. In my room, Anastasia made for the Blake, saying ‘wow’ in a reverent whisper, and Sue adjusted her six-guns, knelt on the floor and opened The Poetry of Meditation. I looked over her shoulder; she was reading an essay on Herbert, rather a good one despite the fact that it was called The Plateau of Assurance’; ‘Herbert Who?’ she must have wanted to ask. Geoffrey, licking at cigarette papers, instructed me to put on a record. The girls being hippies, I selected the most violent and tuneless of all my American LPs, Heroin by the Velvet Underground. The immediate results ? Anastasia swayed in her chair and tapped a sandalled foot; Sue went glazed, craning her neck in figure-eight patterns. There you go.
Geoffrey lit up. ‘Are we going to have some amazing orgy, or what?’ No one reacted. He shrugged, gave the joint to Sue and tottered backwards on to the bed.
A peaceful quiescence followed.
The joint came my way; I drew on it, swallowing rather than inhaling the smoke, and in the high hippie manner, as if it were a normal cigarette. (Ostentatious and/or noisy intake is considered vulgar.) I repeated this several times, and waited. Golden Rain cinders showering my knuckles, yes, and I felt I could have puked my ribcage on to the carpet: apart from that, nothing. And it could not be said that I didn’t respond to drugs; early last summer Geoffrey gave me my first purple heart: I got the screaming hab-jabs for two days, sweated liquid frying-pans throughout the third, awoke from a gentle coma on the fourth. Indeed, my metabolism is in many ways as much of a gullible weathercock as my mind. Geoffrey’s hash didn’t work; he must have been sold a wad of gumboot mud, or, if it was supposed to be grass, a matchboxful of crumbled tobacco, rosemary and aspirins.
I offered it to Geoffrey but he held up his hand with a hollow smile, all of a sudden not having a good time. I couldn’t resist taking a certain fascinated pleasure in his remorse-stricken face; the usual triumvirate: pearly complexion, ruby lips, emerald tongue. His cheeks ballooned as if to contain a mouthful of prancing vomit.
‘Is there anything I can get you?’
‘Water.’
They dehydrate you,’ Anastasia explained.
As I left the room Susan quickened my stride by saying, in an indignant monotone, ‘It bugs me when these guys start trying to hang on The Temple’ this kind of structuralized didactic trip when it’s all the hang-ups and anxieties that make it so … integrated.’
*
Phase two of Jenny and Norman’s row. It came through the walls with high fidelity.