The Rachel Papers Read Online Free PDF

have had more teeth in my head than the average dentist's waiting-room. Soon, I used to think, they'll be coming out of my nose. Then months of high-powered surgery involving metal strips, nuts, clips, bolts ... you name it. For two years I went about the place with a mouth like a Meccano set.
    The diseases you're supposed to get only once I got twice. My bones were the consistency of fresh marzipan. I nurtured seasonal asthma.
    Patently, it was all right by me. Dozy afternoons slugging on opiate cough mixtures, sleeping-draughts dropped at noon, stolen handfuls of Valium, a sheet of aspirins before breakfast. I read every readable book in the house, and also most of the unreadable ones. I wrote two epic poems: an heroicall romance in twenty-four cantos entitled The Tryst' (© 1968), and an asthmatic, six-thousand-line Waste Land called 'Only the Serpent Smiles' (© 1970), some parts of which reappear in the aforementioned 'Adolescent Monologue' sonnet sequence. I wrote cameos of everyone I had ever met. I recorded all I saw, felt, thought. I had myself a time.
    About my queer period.
    I was being a bit roguish (for dramatic purposes) when I suggested to my friend Peter in the sixth-form coffee-bar that I hated all my family. I don't really mind the women in it. This bias officially dawned on me towards the end of my second bedridden winter. I concluded that it was merely rather trustingly Godfrey Winn of me, nothing more sinister. My age? Fourteen.
    However, one afternoon, in a doped half-state, I read a Chunky Paperback on Sigmund Freud.
    I spent the night in a state of mild, run-of-the-mill delirium, sweating quietly as my mind wobbled and raced and swerved: and with morning, came the unshakable, indeed serene, conviction that I was a homosexual. It all added up: I had had, it was true, one queer experience (a smegmatic handful of queer experience in my primary-school cricket pavilion); I was a soprano, a first soprano, often taking descants, in the choir; I was as yet a virgin, and had to lie my unpimpled head off to my friends about how I wanked as often, and with as much piston-wristed savagery, as they said they did. Clearly, the minute I was off my arse I'd be getting it on the bus to Oxford and hawking it there to the friendly undergraduates at Magdalen. In puzzled preparation I read the collected works of Oscar Wilde, Gerard Manley Hopkins, A. E. Housman, and (for what little it was worth) E. M. Forster.
    Next, exploring my powerhouse elder brother's desk I came across a body-building mag, called Tensio-Dynamism or something, one of the ones that explains to you how to kick the shit out of anyone who bugs you at the seaside. Resignedly I went back to my room, curled up in bed with it, started turning the pages, waiting equably for an erection. No way. Idiot faces glaring in pinhead conceit, ghastly all-out-of-control tenements of beef-cake. Never felt less sexy in my life: it beat me how females could fancy them. These gentlemen were, I realized, unrepresentative - but even so.
    Luckily, I had, and still have, a mind like a bear-trap; as soon as one idea wriggles free I'm sprung and tensed for the next unwary paw. As with most people who pass for sensitive, obsessive types, I simply can't get enough of things to get worked up about - an interest. Now I was keen to know why all woman weren't dikes. Anyway, that summer I had a formative heterosexual experience. I'll go into it later. Let me say only that as a direct result I got my first decent pimple, a fine double-yolker, and that that pimple flourished over the weeks, to become the object of much silent envy when I returned to school in September.

    To be fair, there weren't all that many maniacs in the Costa, and hardly more than a smattering of blinkies.
    Sipping on my coffee I tackled the Mirror crossword. If I completed it I would fuck Rachel within ... three weeks. Putting in a couple of clues I decided I would ring her when I got back. It would be intelligent