The Rachel Papers Read Free Page A

Geoffrey (a like-minded friend), I headed for Fat City.
    We holed up for a month in the Belsize Park flat of a Miss Lizzie Lewis, Geoffrey's actress sister, who was away doing a summer season of panto at a holiday camp in Port Talbot. It was a month I always think of with a certain pimply lyricism. It was a month of plonk and coffee-bars, pinball arcades and party-hunts, of looking for girls and wet daydreams, white smell of sweat and dusty afternoons, of getting burnt by ghoulish hippies, of such mind-expanding drug experiences as pork-chop vomiting and consommé diarrhoea. It ended one mid-August morning when I happened to glance down at the undulating area between my stomach and the stomach of a girl I just so happened to be poking at the time (in a sweaty, hungover state, I might add). What I saw there were worms of dirt — as when a working man, his day done, strides home rubbing his toil-hardened hands together, causing the excess grit to wriggle up into tiny black strings, which he soon brushes impatiently from his palms. Only these were on our stomachs and therefore much bigger: like baby eels.
    I was back in Oxford for lunch that same day, with feverish stories about its having been Spain's worst summer since the war - hence the pallor. My parents informed me, however, that I had 'been seen' on the Portobello Road in the last week of July. I denied this and silenced them by pretending to be far iller than I was, not that they need much silencing. (There was also the question of a little going-away present from the young lady - my partner in grime - which is another story.)

    The train got into Paddington about eight thirty. The station, empty for what was a Bank Holiday weekend, seemed vast, echoic, etc., and I hoped that it wasn't going to come on all uncanny and Hemingway-esque on me. Curious (no?) how clearly I remember this: far more clearly than the events of the last couple of weeks.
    I decided in the end to take a cab, arguing that it was an indirect economy because I then couldn't afford to take Gloria out and the evening would cost no more than a level teaspoon-ful of my sister's instant coffee. Furthermore, it was far, far too late to go on the tube without getting denounced by drunkards or, alternatively, castrated by skinheads. As the taxi swept up the ramp into the city, I unwound in the back, quietly rehearsing lower-middle-class accents for the benefit of my brother-in-law. Behind the darkened windows I peered at the many purple-T-shirted and Afghan-fur-waistcoated girls who lined the throughways of Paddington and Netting Hill Gate.
    I had met Norman Entwistle, my sister's terrifying husband, on only two occasions. I saw him now, for the third time, as I walked up the sloping approach to his Campden Hill Square home. If it hadn't been for all the noise he was making I might have missed him altogether.
    Norman was up in the tree that stood alone in the middle of the slender front garden. He looked rather as though he were trying to saw himself in half - an activity that on his previous showings I wouldn't have put past him. Both his legs and one of his arms were wrapped round a branch. Using his free hand in a piston-like action, he was attempting to sever it at its base. The branch, which was obviously dead, hung about six feet from the ground.
    I halted. 'When you cut through the branch,' I pointed out to him, 'you'll fall down.' Norman ignored me. I could just make out some of his face; it was stretched in murderous concentration.
    'To the ground,' I explained.
    I went on watching him for a few seconds, then walked up to the front door and rang the bell. The door was about to open when I heard a wrenching noise - as of the splitting of wood - followed by a loud crash. I turned round. Norman was already on his feet, brushing himself down like someone covered in lice.
    'Christmas,' said Jennifer Entwistle, my sister.

    We kissed, blushing, as we always did when we kissed, and on the way into the