one huge peachy

different worlds

2011-08-28T13:28:00.003+01:00

1. A Hand on a Guitar

The wind ran through him in the wet light of summer’s end, the trees spoke with it and at their bases there were in parts spatter and also piles of different dog’s waste, richly toned organic evidence that seeped and oozed into soil and back into the cyclical and bore characteristic resemblances to the mental processes or the faculties or temperaments of its creators, highly personalized genetic units that would sink one day back with all of their broken down dead bodies to where it began, to the rank monocellular genesis of life replicated into complexity under the watch of stoic indestructible matter towered ancient and pristine and unmoved above the unfurling, for they are but reconfigured shit reborn, reformulated death rebuilt. Rustling leaves like waves hit and breaking, or like the thrum of a motorway, a flowing carbonated product, or a large gathered audience in a city theatre caught mid-mantra instigated by an inexplicably persuasive public speaker, a disrupted distress call subdued by signalling errors and inappropriate transmission conditions and rendered futile even humorous by static-staccato adjectives and feedback-abbreviated clauses that made a new incomplete linguistic framework. His thighs soaked through with conviction he sat on the memorial bench and the world happened, the bench he had mythologized into essence in an earlier consideration, the biographical information engraved on its scuffed brass plate distilling a lifetime into four innocuous words: he loved this place, the heartbreaking irony of the faeces and the piled – or not piled, the randomized disorder of unpiled rubbish feeling like an act of wilful disrespect to a nation of the dead – drinks cans and plastic food trays and wrappers that blew around the half-demolished breeze-block structures that had never progressed beyond the stage of rusted scaffold somehow lost in the obvious sincerity of the chosen font, eighty years and a life had amounted to this, an embryonic council initiative botched and aborted, stark reminders of a half-century’s misjudgements like warnings themselves, monoliths of failure. He sighed at the sound of an infant crying and let the rain hit his face like needle-pricks, a schoolyard taunt, the flushing toilet, the five-six faces all ass smooth and terminally cruel, die needle-prick die, the cubicle door slamming behind them muffled by the water of the washout pool. He remembered the face of an ex-girlfriend; her skin had been tightly drawn over her skull like a primate, and drew back from her lips in huge sincere smiles that punctuated everything she or anyone said. Her breasts had been microscopic beneath her clothes but he had taken a strange comfort in them in the two or three days their relationship had begun, existed and then finished; sleeping together to alleviate the loneliness of the summer, where the fact of their mutual lack of attraction was insignificant compared to the intrigue they felt towards their diametric genital specifics, the first kiss had been good as he explored her taut lips and her white teeth and held her face between his two palms like a ball, and they had ended up in bed and naked although he couldn’t remember how they had become so or what thoughts had led to it. The intercourse had been bad in the daylight that came through the curtains that were striped and too small for the two windows, worse than laying silently afterwards with the warmth of her flat chest – its nipples and areola like rubbery adhesive novelties – pressed against his own side, their breathing off-kilter and disruptive. They tried to kindle something again over the following days and nights but it didn’t get going. During the empty moments of which there were many she picked at an old guitar that she said her father had given her but he had seen a receipt for in her purse. He sat on the edge of the bed and she stood up in front of him in her underwear which he pulled down without thinking and looked at her pubic hair which was long and which he liked. Then she sat on the chair at his desk and played the guitar naked, a hand on a guitar, her torso short behind the curves of its body. While her hands moved across the strings with careful touches that drew notes that grated him inside he told her that if she didn’t stop playing he would put the guitar on the fire; it was a running joke they had and she laughed and continued to play. Later while she slept after against her better judgement he had come inside of her – and for nothing, she thought asleep – he took the guitar outside to where his friends were sat around a fire pit and laid it gently across the flames; all musicians they watched reverently while the hollow body caught fire and like Cerberal tongues the flames licked around the edges of the sound hole and the strings snapped with a weird atonal twang; when the guitar had fallen apart it felt symbolic but he couldn’t be sure why. He turned around and the girl was standing at the back door; she had got dressed hurriedly and was crying, he could see the wet tears in her eyes lit up by the flames, and she walked soundlessly down the steps and into the garden and slapped him hard across the face. The crack of the impact echoed horrifically around the neighbouring gardens. He thought for a second that felt like minutes and slapped her as hard as he could; she fell over onto the concrete but nobody moved to help her, even though he still had the smell of her vagina on the same fingers with which he had slapped her. They were supposed to go to the chemist the following morning for emergency contraception but it would never happen now. She stood up and walked back into the house. They heard something breaking and the front door closing loudly. All but the headstock had burnt away, left ashen like the pallets and logs and secrets they had already burnt. The next day he would run his fingers through the still warm ash morosely and think of himself.

2. Shopping

He didn’t have the shopping channel now although it was one of his favourites, not since the TV had fallen down the stairs in an argument a few weeks earlier – he had wanted to watch repeats of late 90s episodes of The Bill on a classic mediocre drama channel which shunned any programme with a consensus of critical acclaim in favour of cheap and readily accessible long-running serials; it had not, preferring rolling news content or – at worst – home improvement programming – “it has a practical value!” it said, communicating in teletext-provided subtitles awfully pixelated in one of eight colours in a jarring monologue at screen-bottom – and now it was in pieces, its plastic casing irrevocably cracked and its screen shattered in with a dull implosion and its once vital CRT now smashed into fragments and dead like the technology itself at the foot of the short staircase. When the magnitude of the situation started to dawn on him he knew quickly that he would have to make his own shopping channel by watching people shop in public retail outlets. A born spectator, he had little interest of doing any shopping of his own and no money besides; it was the idea of shopping that excited him, the possibility of the products and the people who did buy them. He liked it when the presenters on the shopping channel demonstrated a kitchenware live on air as though it were a complex piece of highly scientific if not dangerous equipment, when it truth it was a slightly awkward and cumbersome way of chopping vegetables for the left-handed, as large as a tissue box with a crude white plastic finish and packaged like the culinary revelation it was guaranteed to never be. He found himself privy to rough erotic fantasies that grew from the perfectly compiled features of the daily presenters: lines of his own spunk shot across the beautiful eyes and blonde blonde hair of Carmel Thomas; a considered handjob from beneath the salt and pepper stylings of Dale Franklin’s pouting, concentrating face, explaining as he did it the quality of the craftsmanship of the parts involved at the bargain price of not ten but only eight GB pounds sterling and ninety nine similar sterling pence; moving himself firmly into the bared reluctant anus of a distant Claudia Sylvester, a consummate professional, who recited reams of national rate telephone numbers throughout the bit with a glassy expression, her voice fading and returning rhythmically with every cock push, and the lines of her cunt struck out behind the channel logo in the name of decency; his mental close ups tended to flick between her face, which moved with the numbers, and his own two slightly bent knees. While the specifics of the faces of the presenters ebbed day-by-day into weird composite photo fit representations that were childish even macabre inaccurate messes of eyeballs and skin tones and entirely inappropriate genital positioning that were now confined strictly within his memories like the very products they had sold (“My Electronic Messiah Pocket” [£19.99 all in], “Thin-Vegetable Presentation Salver with FREE endearment engraving for loved one only [max 6 characters]” [just £79.99 plus courier P&P]) he told himself that he would not be disheartened, and made for the shopping centre, which crouched at the edge of the city like a secret grey mongoloid sibling that you sometimes heard groaning at night but still pretended didn’t exist, a sprawling complex once lauded as architectural futurity and now loathed as a dated and very grave error. First he followed a single mother as she bought cosmetics; her two children cried loudly in the aisles, and he mouthed at them to shut up. She bought a foundation cream, shampoo and conditioner in two separate bottles, a packet of sanitary products and some what looked like body spray, but he couldn’t be sure without asking her. Although she had not discussed the products as she would have been expected to do on the shopping channel – apart from perhaps in split-second mental processes that even she hadn’t noticed – he felt strangely alive or complete, almost as if he had bought the products for himself. This was the natural completion of the shopping act, transaction orgasm, the exchange of product. The world had become his television, he thought. He felt momentarily sad for his broken TV set; it was a lost friendship. But really, friendships didn’t mean a lot. The single mother was assimilated into his presenter fantasies; he would perform cunnilingus on her as she verbally demonstrated the versatile uses of shampoo around the household. Next he followed a teenage boy into a games shop; the boy browsed the cases of the games and read the text on the back of some of them. He watched him carefully from the other side of the shop and could almost visualise the telephone numbers displayed in a constant loop on his own shopping channel, the testimonials from satisfied customers that scrolled down the right hand side of the screen as text messages sent directly to air, spelling mistakes and all. In his fantasies this boy would urinate into empty glass coke bottles and drink it in perpetuity inside a salt-circle flanked by raucously masturbating schoolteachers while people phoned up for a limited edition ornament. It was an exciting time to be alive.

3. My Best Friend

They called Tidswell Childs ‘Boy Solicitor’, because of his age and because of his unlikely profession. At twelve years gone he felt more boy than man but reality disagreed, expectation too, and Boy Solicitor he was, would always be. The age slipped past the Norfolk legal profession unmentioned, like the paraphilia, and while some of the backstabbing shit-shots from the Cathedral Close would make infant jokes or nappy jokes or little bollocks jokes or hairless kid jokes or fish finger sandwiches on white bread without crusts jokes (like Q. “What does Tidswell Childs have for lunch in his child’s lunchbox?” A. “Fish finger sandwiches on white bread without crusts, fucking nappy-wearing hairless little bollocks good for fucking nothing infant shithead.”, &c.) in the soulless lawyer bars at the end of the working week, to his face they gurned with professional respect and clapped his suited shoulders – he got his gear in the specialist tailor and youth clothier ‘Manboy’ – and shook his hands like equals. His latest case was defending some guy called himself ‘The Human Landscaper’ and left flyers pasted up in underpasses and on lampposts: “I WILL DEFLOWER BY APPOINTMENT”, and other such sloganeering of no doubt psychopathic intent, his sexual services (they paid him, with pocket money or in grocery items taken from their parents kitchens!) now a menace through the high schools and the churches and beyond. His real name was Carl Sturgeon, 43, and – a walking self-fulfilling prophecy – he had a number of Piscean features and he had come to Tidswell Childs after his fourth arrest because he had heard Childs was good. The best. He was. The first time Childs laid eyes on him, hunched over double in a hard plastic chair in the police interview room with a face streaked with knuckle-sized bruises, the kid had punched him so hard in the balls that Sturgeon had thrown up thin bile onto the edge of the desk. “We’re not best friends,” Childs said, as he said to all of his clients to sever the personal. It was the motto of his chambers and printed on his letterheads. Tidswell Childs Boy Solicitor: Sever the Personal. It was sound legal practise and the two hit it off pretty well soon after. Sturgeon had been picked up for statutory rape, sex with minors and soliciting for sex as, weirdly, he had been selling his own body to those of virginal females for a bespoke deflowering service. For a guy with his modest physical attributes (Piscean, see above) and limited carnal experiences his human landscaping business had been quite successful, and the charges against him said that he had personally, through business transactions, deflowered as many as seven girls aged fourteen to sixteen – each of whom had paid him a nominal fee of about a fiver (the invoices, written in his own handwriting and with his name and address printed carefully at the top, were some of the more difficult evidence for his defence to deal with) and was apparently anxious to avoid the stigma of virginity loss within the closed ranks and guffawed fumblings of their own peer group – and one adult woman aged thirty-seven, although she was seldom mentioned in the legal documents. His adverts had been published in the local presses under ‘Other Services’, and when the police searched his flat they found a calendar that indicated approximately five other scheduled deflowerings over the course of the coming months, a success that Sturgeon put down to good marketing. As Boy Solicitor, Tidswell Childs had little interest in sexual matters, and what interest he did have was really abstract and essentially filmic and a long way removed from the actual physical coupling of two or more genitals in any real or tangible sense, and as such he considered himself to be perfectly suited to Sturgeon’s defence without being sullied or biased by the apparent severity of the alleged crimes. They discussed the possibility of pleading insanity over ice cream sundaes that Tidswell Childs’s mother had prepared especially, but they knew it wasn’t going to wash. It was in all respects a clear cut case: there were the achingly detailed and painfully honest testimonials from the traumatized girls (“he sweat into my hands”; “less than I anticipated”; “always imagined it to be better”; “the thing he shouldn’t have”; “if he was a real gardener my parents said they would have fired him and my parents aren’t those kinds of people generally and said as much”, &c.); DNA evidence found on or in underwear, nightclothes, bedclothes, genitals; invoices as aforementioned; the adverts themselves, as placed and paid for by one Carl Sturgeon; and Sturgeon’s own written confession, business model and business projections for the coming tax year (prior to arrest and detainment), presented bound and with charts and graphs as contextually appropriate (which in another high profile case also implicated his lenders and investors). And yet despite the damning evidence, Tidswell Childs said that the best they had were the two quite flimsy potentials which just might lessen the sentencing. The first was the intrigue – how had he done it, how had he made those girls pay him for their sex? There was something perversely thrilling about the whole enigma, and depending on the jury it could go either way, either jealously condemning with the full force of the law or, conversely, unconsciously impressed into clemency; the second was the unquestionable success of the business model, which showed spunk (no pun intended) and initiative and might be put to better use in serving the struggling Norfolk community. They were incredibly long shots, but Tidswell Childs was an incredibly competent solicitor and a master orator. His courtroom rhetoric was rife with abstract theoretical concepts and pop-culture metaphors that were at once archly modern and demonstrative of a profound wisdom way beyond his years. “You know Sturgeon,” said Tidswell Childs, his chin a mess of melted ice cream and stringy chocolate sauce, “I’m not sure we can win this one. But for what it’s worth you seem a good enough guy to me.” Sturgeon looked at him and gave him a blank business card. “Thanks Boy Solicitor,” he said. “That means a lot.”

4. The Party

It was the newest – not funnest – party (political) in town: the Badshirts. It was like the Blackshirts only badder (in shirt quality) but about equal in prejudice and (late) popularity, and formed by a guy who had convinced his own children that he was descended from a secret carnal affair between Oswald Mosley and his (the guy’s) maternal grandmother, a locally treasured Norfolk fascist from the Jarrold family who used her publishing connections to print BUF pamphlets in the early 1940s. Her extensive diaries were published in a limited run and gave detailed written accounts of their intercourse and correspondence, but the veracity of her claims has never been proven and most people tended to dismiss it because she was partly retarded at the time. The city’s long history of anti-Semitism crystallized into a kind of acceptability in Margot Jarrold, whose spirited and staunchly nationalistic speeches had been a regular feature at a variety of East Anglia’s gala events until her death in 1984. She called Jews devils but with sneering affection, as you would an infant relative whose shit you’d just sat down in, which oddly won her sizeable public approval. It was funny the way she slurred her words and trembled uncontrollably when she talked about birthrights and strongholds, everyone thought so. Although her desperate defence of Mosley’s Nazi alliance was always left bubbling under the surface of her ever-slackening drunken pallid chops, the legacy of importance and infamy was enough for Ferguson Cusp (he had lost the nominal department store heritage because of conjugal decisions and had had no contact with the Jarrolds’ since his parents had divorced twenty years ago and he been stuck with his oafish father’s sideburn oil and the vast lakes of sweat pooled on the ridged horizontal crest of his stomach) – he felt the blood of Mosley in his veins and he had a responsibility both to his ancestor and to the memory of the great politics of British fascism. He recruited three or four of his handful of close male friends with the promise of civic significance and a good meal and began educating them on poorly understood fascist history, paraphrasing ideological content into digestible, easily replicable quotes which made little sense once the surface had been even slightly scratched away. He shunned economic concerns and a wider sense of their own place within a broader political spectrum and instead tended to focus his politics on the decadent evils of the international Jewry (his grandmother had once famously derided the Jewish faith at a customer evening and had always refused to eat Jewish-influenced bakery products) and the debauched degeneration of the non-British peoples of Britain (in point of fact he had already had his first slogan, the profoundly odd “Get Lost, n-B P o’ B!”, printed onto a bulk box of five hundred car window stickers, with the Badshirts symbol smack bang in the middle [they had wanted to use the red/white/blue flash and circle motif of the BUF to give themselves some tangible association to their own imagined history but were legally obliged not to, so instead he inverted the symbol, which looked and was stupid for two reasons he failed to pick up on: firstly, it made it look like the lightning bolt was striking upwards, which felt much more wrong that it should have when you saw it; and second inversion was often considered not as an homage to but in fact a rejection of the symbol theretofore inverted, meaning that Ferguson Cusp’s inverted flash and circle looked superficially more like a specifically anti-fascist symbology, indicative of the kind of mistakes that would plague the Badshirts, after the joint decision to print all party stationery with the inverted flash and circle and later not have enough capital left to replace it once the anti-fascist suggestion had been pointed out to them {as well as typographical mistakes in the local presses which rendered Badshirts as Badshits, which – statistically – is one of the sixty most common typos made on QWERTY keyboards}]), mainly because the Jewish population of Norwich was probably less than three hundred and because most of East Anglia was fundamentally racist; curtailing minorities made for achievable goals. They shopped for hours for unanimous polyester-blend shirts, invariably bad because money was tight, and ended up with a few entirely shapeless mostly beige numbers, styles made all the worse because they didn’t look like as though they didn’t care but like they did care but had still failed; tucked into grey cargo pants that Ferguson Cusp had had left over from a part-time maintenance job a few year earlier – smothered in superfluous zips and pockets and clasped to their buttocks like oiled cling-film – they looked entirely absurd, like shitty carpenters who had lost their minds on what was supposed to have been a leisure-centric walking holiday. Regardless of the negligible quality of the garments the Badshirts felt the instantly gratifying sense of camaraderie and the psychological crutch that comes with donning a uniform however grotesque, and they felt motivated and invigorated and part of a bigger picture for probably the first time in their lives. Ferguson Cusp motioned for the mandatory wearing of hats but all they could find at short notice were a few lime green baseball caps, which they proudly wore despite themselves; Cusp even tried to grow a moustache like his hypothetical fascist ancestor, which he believed would give him a certain charisma that would invite people’s trust, but he had only been doing it for less than a week and so far only a few awkward tufts jabbed out from his philtrum at awkward angles with great patches of bald skin between them. Whilst no one really knew who they were they felt incredibly powerful in the streets, although based on the values and expectations of the twenty-first century their commonality of attire made them seem like an esoteric boy band of middle-aged, average-looking males, a world away from the bland, faceless, suited, corporate-looking pricks with all the magnetism of a wilted pot plant who had become synonymous with contemporary UK politics. With the fire of ignorance in their bellies they took a bus out to the cemetery, where there was a segregated section for the burials of the Jewish community. They began to push at a couple of the memorials, pressing their shoulders firmly into the stone and trying to turn them over, scuffing the lawn and soil at the base of the gravestones with the soles of their shoes and thinking general anti-Semitic thoughts. It was a futile act but in the cold light of day and with everything else he had been trying to organise like the shirts and the car window stickers with the flawed symbol Ferguson Cusp had not really had the time to give a great deal of thought to how he could essentially initiate his political party, with manifestos and public speaking and local councils and policies. He had enrolled himself onto a public speaking course at the college to try to learn some kind of rhetorical dexterity but it didn’t start for a few weeks and the combination of his dreadful machine-gun stammer (that actually did sound worse than he imagined it to, as opposed to the opposite which applies to most people with stammers whereby the audible stammering is not as debilitating as the stammerer imagines it to sound and is just the result of some self-conscious amplification of the impediment within their own head) and broad Norfolk dialect made everything he said sound as though he were undergoing a constant stream of intense strokes, particularly when he was nervous. Across a knee-high wire fence a handful of mourners from the main cemetery were pointing at the desecrating Badshirts, who had failed to make any real impact on the burial sites, and Ferguson Cusp raised a fascist salute and tried explain who they were and what they were doing, for their children and for Britain itself as a physical country, ridding them all of the foreign plague and returning the country to a state of false ancient purity. When the police arrived and pushed him into the car he was still stuttering over the first syllable of the word Badshirts, his face contorted with the pointlessness of the effort.

5. Snow Fun

The two policemen leant nervously over the gearstick and the handbrake – their stab vests creaking with the displacement, their radios turned low but still transmitting hissed warnings – and kissed gently in the darkness, and ionised snow fell outside the windscreen. It caused sparks to flare like bioluminescent insects when the snowflakes hit the bonnet, a tender light show that left the smell of charred vehicle paint and distant burning dense in the air. They tugged at each other’s belts with the apocalyptic urgency of the unexplained phenomena, the whole sky alight with the immense electrical blizzard. At the bottom of the hill unfortunate pedestrians fell to the floor and tried to cover their faces, to protect their skin from the jolt of the snowflakes, but they were far too many and they slowly fried on the pavement in huge numbers laid head-to-toe, cheeks left plague-blackened by the impact, the cumulative effect of hundreds, thousands of small electric shocks wearing away the threads of their lives like the elbows on a loved jacket. Birds dropped dead from the sky, hearts burst in their chests, and the river surged with a faint blue aura that hovered inches above its surface. The policemen heard the chaos below them; heard power surges and desperate pleas; heard crying children whose plastic anoraks had melted to their skin while they tobogganed down short grassy hills; heard the terrible drone of vehicles turned blind without traffic lights and staggering to forgotten destinations while their sat navs – circuitry corrupted by the charge of the snowfall – instructed them calmly to rest, rest, rest; heard one hundred thousand tearful telephone calls to say goodbye or to hear a voice or to feel the rapture all amplified through the æther; heard the elastic scrape of the flexing bristles of the City Council workers rubber brooms while in protective gear they swept the snow into huge non-conductive vessels that hummed louder with every deposit like portable substations, and vibrated slightly with the weight of the energy; heard the creaking alien twang of the falling pylons that flanked the peripheries of the city as they buckled to their knees like Goliath crushed, lashing cables tossing sparks with sharp whip-cracks propelled by their own tension, the sound of the collapsing metal like an ancient scream rendered obsolete by the glut of the ionized snowfall. They heard it all and they listened, and felt the weight of the guilt of their profession in every piece of uniform they shed.

6. Spring Clean

They called themselves ‘Murder of Prose’ – oh were they ever happy with that, such multifaceted nomenclature, the symbolism, the wordplay, the slightly ominous (Southern [Norfolk {of Norwich city, at least – to wit, Surlingham}] Gothic) allusiveness, the Poe referential, the unmistakable and publically verifiably creative intellect behind any such titular pronouncement of bloody great greatness; it was trouser-droppingly, eye-wateringly, perineum-clenchingly terrific, and it was theirs, they, them had done, which is to say named, it, or rather, THEMSELVES, given birth to their own personas; fucking geniuses was the consensus among them about them, geniuses, genii even, whichever the righter these writers most certainly were – and each of the four longed to reconstruct their entire lives as written, specifically prose metafiction, leaving just their own unpublished representations – albeit at once infinite and bi-cosmic (mac- and micro, pertaining to [a] scope and [b] event stature/assessed mundanity) and perpetually incomplete – behind for historical record and or interest and or lack thereof, replacing the physical life of repayments and gainful employment and what they collectively termed the LCs (or lower concerns) with extensive fictionalized autobiographical accounts of the minutiae of the lives they imagined but didn’t and wouldn’t live. “The big picture,” they smirked as one into wine glasses half stuffed with tepid Pinot, any sense of individual voice long-absorbed in the kind of highly nasal self-congratulation that an incredible arrogance affords, “is beyond passé to the extent that to call it passé is itself passé thus rendering all comprehensible notions of ‘passé’ and what it means to thereby be so considered – and in fact any attempt to render any kind of emotional or theoretical response to absolutely anything outside of oneself – profoundly meaningless, and it’s fucking boring and bourgeois to even think about momentarily let alone speak of even though I have now here right now accidentally spoken of it but only in order to assemble a point of higher intellectual standardization that as cultural commentators it is our duty to undertake, my faculties are larger than yours (by which yours I refer of course to the wider ignorant public person rather than to my own prose associates seated in positions thrice around me as such, gesture, gesture, gesture); in recapitulation: give me the SMALL picture and note even comment on the irony of my deliberately capitalized speech pattern.” Appreciative titters, rippled applause you just wouldn’t hear elsewhere. This was the literary elite that that cunt Amis could only dream about. They would renounce the lived life, it would all but cease, the dirty and the physical both, abstracted into sentences and dialogue and webs of intertextual reference; relationships would be plot devices, characters mere vessels of ill-conceived ideologies, events and traumas clumsily symbolised out of meaning with a hearty sweep of the keyboard, swamped by the void of absent reality, all the worth of a fundamentally racist joke told to a room full of sleeping children, no context. For life itself was hard, shit too; all the better to create a life of one’s own in some wilful act of atheistic intent. Fuck God! Fuck you! “Our balls will be clean, impeccably so, distinct as they are from the life outside of our – as singular personages – selves.” They were all depressingly in the midst of the 35-45 years demographic and on the face of it – how right that face was, how right and telling and insightful – none had amounted to a great deal of the kind of value they aspired to, save for a comprehensive and unshakeable sense of their own self-worth which sat uncomfortably with the stark minimalism of their own proven skill sets. Curtis Bunyan was the – mostly self- – appointed leader of the collective, an oxymoronic nominal title that he especially relished. He was a former performance poet, whose okay/decent live sets were rendered worthless by the flat, drab pamphlets he insisted on publishing once a fortnight. He had alienated his old literary circle – poets – by proclaiming with the tenacity of a French theorist that his remarkable intellect was limited by the poetic medium and that he himself was better – which is to say too good for and to associate with by proxy – them (his old literary circle). The other three were all slightly in awe of his hostile personality, and all had been personally insulted by Curtis Bunyan at his final poetry performance – at which his wife had given a pretty uninspired reading of her prepared statement which outlined her intent to leave him for the master of ceremonies, a twenty-three year old shit with a Faber pamphlet under his belt – and the palpable tension between Bunyan and the rest of them felt like drowning on television. He had singled each of the three (Murder of Prose) out for particular, mostly unwarranted criticism; they had performed some of their own prose-poems during the open mic section that had preceded his finale and Bunyan, near immobile with drunkenness and public shame and embarrassment and a whole lot of other bad or otherwise negative feelings, deconstructed their personalities at length in – to his credit – measured stanzas of iambic verse that became more slurred until, with the lights up to full and the room pretty much empty, chairs being stacked around him and the guy behind the bar cashing up the takings, Curtis Bunyan was just shouting noises and sobbing in a weird kind of rhythmic breakdown. He had been unemployed for thirty-six months, a calculation he insisted on doing in monthly increments for the added gravitas, despite his CV containing a wealth of carefully selected superlative adjectives. Keith Denmark had been especially enamoured by his first taste of the scene; his own persuasions had emerged at eight, when past a mouthful of white Granny Smith flesh in his primary school lunchroom he honked the rather one-dimensional and entirely mortal line “apples are beautiful” with all the meek sincerity of a romantic, an image only slightly scuppered by the pools of digestive saliva that dripped clear as day from the corners of his lips that had been puckered into whistle shape by the half-chewed fruit. The other kids beat him shitless with the kind of humorous determination that sticks through the whole of a school career. They quickly formed a collective, the collective (made an unholy foursome with the addition of a pair of brothers who for reasons inexplicable had by idiot parents both been christened Neil), and threw themselves into theoretical prose around Curtis Bunyan’s dining table. Glasses refreshed, then, the matter at hand remained pertinent, even grew in pertinence with each conceited declaration, four faces further reddened (to crimson, to claret, to – even – Burgundy!) with the delirious unchecked pomp of desperate dreams. “We must write ourselves out of existence!” barked Bunyan, slapping his open palm onto the surface of the table, the wine glasses clinking themselves in an unconscious but unanimous ritual of agreement. “Bloody bastard well out of it!” Even the walls groaned aye. “And how – YES! – how do we do it, Curtis? How do we WRITE OURSELVES OUT OF EXISTENCE?” Curtis Bunyan swallowed down his wine in an ugly gulp – the wine got cheaper as the night progressed, from five (half price) to three (full price) pounds with the dead hours – and dropped his glass onto the wooden floorboards his wife had chosen – shitty varnish. The master of ceremonies for fuck’s sake. Cunt called himself postmodern in self-publicity! Fourth rule of literary longevity, but fucked if I can remember the other three: don’t call yourself postmodern in self-publicity – and it smashed easily, like it was made to do just that. Then he took the bottle and swallowed what was left, about half a glass worth; there was a gag reflex mid-swallow which the other three tried not to notice, but he had been shaken by their pitying squints and they knew that he knew it. He dropped the bottle too but it didn’t break and only made a noise that was drawn out by its loud circular Sisyphean arcs back and forth across the oak. The neighbours would be knocking soon. Unsteadily he stood up from his chair, which fell onto its back behind him, and walked around the table taking the three glasses of the other three writers and drinking their respective quantities of the wine and then dropping their empty glasses onto the floor as well. “It’s very simple,” he said, lurching back to his chair with an accidental urgency that motivated the others in spite of themselves. “Very bloody simple: we write.” He nodded with his eyes closed, basking in the majesty of the truths that he had revealed. “We keep on fucking writing. Just stop doing and start writing; and the first one to stop is out. Out? An easy quiz.” He pointed to the door. “Now write,” he said. Keith Denmark nodded excessively and watched Curtis Bunyan’s head roll slightly on its neck. “WRITE!” He shouted this and the sound of his voice reminded him of his own gone wife. They picked up their satchels and pulled out netbooks and wrote lives for themselves from the confines of a lamp-lit room, their lips moving with the birthed words, their own memories replaced by the false ones they created, the awful inevitability of real events completely erased by the genuine excitement of things that could but never would happen. They wrote with the desperation of pricks. So when Curtis Bunyan’s sister came into for a spring clean two or three weeks later – she did it every three months – they were all still sat at the table, only the place really stank and their trousers and pants were full to bursting of weeks of their own shit and piss; their netbook batteries were long expired; their unshaved faces cast hideous shadows on the highly polished floor; and reams and reams of printed manuscript all double-line spaced and of Times New Roman font were piled unfinished at each of their sides. They were still and cold and colourless. Oh how they had written themselves out of existence! How dead they really were! She flicked through some of the pages but soon stopped; it was quite a lot of what she’d call – and she’s not a literary critic but she does know what she likes, Curtis – shit, not really her kind of thing at all; no real purpose to it, no proper ending etc. It just stopped.

7. A New Boyfriend

Her new boyfriend was one hell of a guy, that’s why she made him up. He had all the best chat-up lines: “I dreamt I held your cunt cupped in the palm of my hand”; “butcher’s counter! baby your decorative facial components in the light of the refrigerator are decently prepared meat cuts to me at attractive prices also”; “please let me bask in the imperceptible motion of your triangular tits like skin stickers on your ribcage”; “in the right light – which is darkness or near-darkness, half-light, dusk – your simple face like heavy-handed etching into slabs of solid limestone can almost look prettier than it otherwise might”; “your unintentionally cruel mouth looks less so when it’s parted around my half-hard glans”. She imagined his jaw and his thumbs so vividly. She was a chronic frotteur, had been for years, a condition she attributed to what she considered to be her excessive height although she was only five feet ten tall. Her pale plain face glowed eerily in the dark at rock concerts, the sadness of its structure made all the more terrible by the insistent creamy hue of her sunken cheeks. When she closed her eyes, laced heavily with pouched black bags sagging beneath them like some alien marsupial, she heard his voice loudly and felt his hot almost rank breath in the canal of her ear – he always whispered in the left ear – and it made her squirm some and the hairs on her forearms stand up. He would say the cunt thing, grunt it with an incredible declarative urgency – she loved the idea of her cunt, the whole cunt, being held in a hand as though it were a separate entity disengaged from the complexity and awkwardness of her body, just a fleshy composite of self-lubricating physical entertainment as transportable as any other handheld article of modern social life but rich with nerve endings and receptors instead of solder and microchips – or perhaps some other innuendo or a directly sexual observation or proposition and she would feel herself swept away into the ringing delirium of what she considered to be love, and she felt deaf and her head went hot and she almost blacked out. He was an amazing guy and an even better lover and she imagined his fingers in place over her vulva and it was exciting because nobody else knew about it or even saw him let alone the handful of fingers he had slipped under the waist of her jeans in primary colours and was right there going to gently fuck her with to a forgettable indie band. Before she made up her new boyfriend the frotteurism had been getting out of hand and she was rubbing against usually six or seven separate people in a given day. At the start it had been quite discreet, just hands or arms against the same in crowded public places like shops and station concourses, where among security announcements and luggage she made herself come with the delicious sensuality of unspoken, unreciprocated and unnoticed physical contact. The three un’s became the hallowed triad of her blossoming paraphilia, and she often told herself that is she ever had the spare cash then she would have the words tattooed above her pubic hair, each word forming one of the three sides of an isosceles triangle. In queues in the supermarket she would brush the outside of her hand against the hand of another, little finger side out, and it was amazing to feel close to something; hurriedly it escalated to buttocks, her hand pressing into, and it was so intense that she had to make a conscious effort to not shout or scream out. She found the flat shapeless buttocks of otherwise fat men to be the most alluring; she didn’t know why but assumed it to be something to do with her childhood. And also the buttocks of other women; she hadn’t ever felt sexually attracted to a woman and didn’t now, but the fact that their buttocks like hers and all women’s led onwards to a vagina made them seem quite special. Sometimes people would notice her rubbing her hand up against their private buttocks but she always looked away and folded her arms, and nobody ever said anything; hands on buttocks is a pretty common phenomena in well-peopled locations, and the exhaustive statistics she had constructed showed that 46 per cent of the body parts of 66 per cent of people had at some stage in their adult or child life been non-consensual party to frotteurism, statistics which she thought must surely speak for themselves, if at all. Over time the frotteurism progressed to more conspicuous body parts like thighs and her own glutes and frontal pelvis; she rubbed her thighs against people’s idle hands and imagined they were involved in a passionate physical relationship, the kind depicted in passionate TV films. If she was sitting next to somebody in a cinema or on a bus or something she would start gently rubbing her thigh up against their own, testing the water; when the two thighs touched the resistance was arousing, and she would do it gradually more and more until they would usually just reposition themselves so their thighs were out of reach and probably think that she had some problem or was mentally retarded. The pelvis and the glutes were much harder to achieve but was the fetishistic end point, and the thought of it preoccupied her until she had to leave her job. Over a period of weeks she found that the most likely place to get away with it – please remember the three un’s – was on rush-hour underground services, and she visited London for days on end to scale these new heights. When the trains were at their most congested and the stench was of combined strangers most confidential body parts she let her body move with the rhythms of the train and the tracks, the turns and jumps in the lines which she memorized, and at the right moment would thrust her intergluteal cleft back onto the thigh of another passenger and rest it there for fractions of a second, or allow herself nearly imperceptible vertical movements which blended meticulously with the atrocious conditions of the morning commute. She straddled the correctly angled legs of commuters she would single out, left each of her legs flanking their own, and with every jerk of the carriage let her vulva collapse onto the thigh, itself tensed for stability on the moving train. On the several occasions that this went noticed she found it difficult to explain, and the interpretations were usually so far off; people thought it meant that she wanted to fuck them, that this was part of some primal seduction that predated language and emotion both. Some of them would follow her off the train and she would usually let them do it, although she wasn’t really into it, because it seemed the polite thing to do; they were always silent and very quick because they had wives at home – rings, eyes guilty and apologetic – and didn’t want to be late for work, and in the quiet streets around stations their moving cocks just felt so dead compared to the triad. She decided to try psychiatric therapy to address what her doctor had said was a problem, although in truth she couldn’t see how it was that much of a problem for her or anyone else. As is often the case the therapy proved to be much weirder than anything she had ever done herself; a room of three women including her and six men all dry humping mostly limbless androgynous mannequins – they had no arms and their legs stopped just after the buttocks – while a therapist took notes from a chair at the front of the room and two or three more therapists watched on monitors in neighbouring rooms. She assumed that the men must have gone at it until they came in their pants and found it unsettling that they never went out to clean up and just sat back down in plastic chairs with slightly ruddy cheeks and waited for the therapy to continue. The therapist explained that frotteurism was an essentially incomplete act that never allowed for healthy climax, and it was this lack of any tangible conclusion that gave them the patients these terrible psychosexual issues; by allowing them to pleasure themselves frotteuristically but to the fullest extent – i.e. sexual climax, with the supplied mannequins – the therapist was confident that he would show them that genuine sexual pleasure and fulfilment could only be attained through the complete (linear/Aristotelian) act of sexual intercourse and not through practice of the frotteuristic triad (although he didn’t use the term ‘frotteuristic triad’ because that was her own personal term and thus not recognised in the psychiatric community) that was, he said, fundamentally anticlimactic. She disagreed silently because she routinely reached a particular kind of orgasm during her frots. The crazed eyes of the other patients as they ground their pelvises into the mannequins were almost inhuman; it would be one of the images that stuck with her throughout her life. She sipped weak instant coffee whitened with powdered milk from a polystyrene cup with her mannequin sat on the plastic chair next to hers. The therapist tried to engage with her and asked her why she didn’t want to rub herself against the mannequin but she ignored him as politely as she could and left after a few of the sessions; they were voluntary anyway. She booked tables for one for her and her new boyfriend, and ordered soup with crusty bread and listened to him talking all night, then swigged from a bottle of cheap white wine while they walked each other home. The new boyfriend had had a positive effect on the frotteurism, too; she no longer rubbed up against strangers, the triad not forgotten but just a memory. All she needed to rub against now were the imaginary body parts of the new boyfriend, willing her very buttocks against the sensual abrasion of his day blue jeans. He stripped her in her mind and they rubbed together in white clammy skin and attentive palms, and his chat-up lines grew exponentially into an endless text of swelling signifiers and astonishing beauty. In those times and others they were real lovers and were complete.

8. The Girl in the Red Dress

The girl in the red dress waited outside his office for him every evening, piles of discarded chewed nicotine gum dotting the pavement around her in a semi-circle like the amulets of a bizarre suburban witchcraft. She wasn’t a girl at all but a woman of almost fifty – a dark bottle blonde former club singer whose strained movements and erratic gesticulations made it seem as though she was always one step away from collapse, and her painted bottom lip trembled rapidly when she let her guard down – with the promise of wordless intercourse beneath the tight red dress. He had met her in the train station a week or so earlier; she had been sitting on the floor in convulsive tears, the other commuters walking in large circles around her as if she were half-completed cordoned-off maintenance work. With her knees pulled up to her chest and tight balls of sodden toilet roll stuck to her face he could see up her dress right to her underwear, to the thick pubic hair that curled out of its sides. Even from fifteen or twenty feet away he could smell the sharpness of mid-range vodka on her breath and the intensely artificial scent of her perfume brought literal tears to his eyes like strong eucalyptus medicine, so strong he could almost taste it. He had recently got involved in an internet circle of “Sombre Porn”, which at its elemental level was based around the paraphilic enjoyment derived from the weeping of women of a certain age (usually over 40s, whose sadness always seemed more convincing); it was an increasingly popular niche, particularly with the Chinese and the Russians (something about their red past or present seemed to lend itself to eroticised sorrow). The usual formulaic scenario for the sombre flick would be one crying woman and at least two guys – the woman would get fucked by one of the guys, crying all the time, while the other one watched them both doing it. The really exciting part came from the metafictional techniques that tended to be a feature of the genre: the second male (i.e. the one not fucking) would frequently look directly at the camera and slowly masturbate while addressing the audience with a hauntingly detailed expositional narrative regarding the origin of the woman’s grief – maybe a dead spouse or a long-term debt problem or something – the hearing of which recounted in such a cold and detached voice making it far harder and worse for the woman, of course, and making her cry all the more as the gravity of what she was doing kind of sank in right at that moment, and the devastating eye contact of the masturbating narrator whose measured blinks were tantamount to hypnosis coupled with the woman’s sobbing and the other males two moving buttocks or sliding cock and awful white British thighs patched with spots of hair was somehow deeply arousing, atrocious and pitiful all at the same time. He had got into it through a guy he knew from work, both administrators within the health service – they enjoyed giving out their public sector email addresses on internet forums, like an instant token of their own self-worth, and used their computer ID cards for discounted takeaways. The girl in the red dress had been trying to lever herself up from the station floor without success and he offered to help her, eyes of the whole station watching with comprehensive expressions of disgust drawn over their flowing cheeks, the embarrassing spectacle of the whole bloody thing frankly improper and ripe for judgemental recounting, for use as a comment pertaining to something wider, of national significance, the drunken bitch in the red dress symptomatic of a more generic degeneration of the UKs moral code, their lips so stiff with genuine almost maddening revulsion that their mouths looked like wounds hacked into the cold vertical flanks of slaughtered pigs. She clutched her mottled arms around his throat and he led her out of the station; she wanted to get a drink and they sat in a pub across the bridge looking at each other over the table, she doing these half-smiling apologetic shrugs for the state she was in but then snorting out tears the minute he said it’s fine, her face looking younger in the flickering blue and red lights of the video quiz machine, its fine lines filled with occasional bursts of ominous music, the theme of a dated TV show that really showed its age among carpets and a uniform choice of mundane lagers; she stopped crying after a few doubles and her hands steadied and she started to explain, her voice deeper than his own. Her husband had died quite suddenly a few days earlier, diagnosed only a month before that with some kind of cancer – she thought pancreatic, but the medical specificities eluded her in the haze of empty glasses – and she was ruined by the grief. Loosely he held her orange leathery hand while she spoke and she pressed her long white fingernails down into his palm and told him how alone she was, how she didn’t know how she would cope, how she was still young at heart and only slightly older in body, and he looked at her breasts and the edges of the underwear that crept above her hemline. Two drinks a piece later and they were in the toilets locked in a cubicle, kissing with the kind of fervent adolescent awkwardness which suggested that neither had ever done such a thing; she knelt on his suit jacket on the tiled floor and sprawled across the open toilet seat, and he fucked her from behind and was finished almost instantly. They straightened their clothes in the smell of pub piss and the whine of the extractor fan, her knees red as her dress in circles from the hard floor. When he asked her if she had the money for the train fare to wherever it was she was going she started to cry again, and thanked him for letting her feel close to somebody even if only for a brief time – which made him feel momentarily inadequate – and she hoped he didn’t think badly of her for doing something like that so soon after her husband’s death but that grief was strange and she needed to feel needed or even alive. It was getting late. He said he didn’t have a telephone but would like to see her again and so told her where he worked and said she should meet him at five o’clock one day, if she wanted too. A handful of trysts followed an almost identical pattern and always climaxed in the same pub toilet cubicle, every day as though they had never met before – she tearfully took him through the story and he emptily consoled her into mechanical intercourse. On the sixth working day again she was there outside his office; he walked over to her and shook her hand – they performed this odd formality religiously, gave their meetings a superficial hint of respectability – and said that he wanted her to meet some of his friends. Her eyes were dry and it was the first day that she looked as though she hadn’t been crying since he had met her in the train station, and even the smell of vodka was weaker or maybe not there at all; she hugged him and he felt her breasts pressed into his chest. They took a taxi from the rank at the station to a small flat in a red-brick block on the edge of the city, the face of the building dotted with enormous satellite dishes that were now entirely functionless but left pointing at the sky as though the earth had been abandoned. She followed him up to the second floor and into one of the flats where two men were standing with nothing on but white sport socks that were dirty black on the soles and with half-erections hanging in front of them. There was a digital camcorder set up on a tripod, pointed at a queen-sized double bed with a cheap armchair next to it. The men said hello to him but barely even acknowledged her and she felt startled by the camera and by the big spotlight that one of them turned on at the plug. “Take your clothes off then,” he said getting behind the camera, and she felt afraid and didn’t want to do it and considered her dead husband, but in tears – they came! – she did as she was told.

9. Pizza and Talking

The fire swept through the house over pizza and talking on the night of June twenty-fourth. Peter Falk had died the day before and there was no better way to commemorate his life than with three or four slices each of quite mediocre supermarket-bought pizza. We’d been an item for a week or two, had hit it off at a bus stop with a limp Benjaminian (she said even Nietzschean) analysis of Wings of Desire. “These angels,” I said, “Are Benjamin. ‘Where we perceive a chain of events he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front on his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.’” I said it like I was paraphrasing but of course I wasn’t. “That’s the thing – they sacrifice it all, all this divine atemporality, this immense kind of boundless knowledge, all of eternity just a timeless mess of crossed wires exploding in the same instant. They sacrifice everything for the taste of a hot cup of coffee from a portable vendor, and to dress badly and to fuck a circus acrobat. They throw it all away to enter the horror of the world. Their angelic paradox! Born into time, from one hopelessness to another. And Peter Falk was one! The Angel Columbo.” We played out our favourite scenes and drank jugs of coffee until we felt sick, and I thought a lot about Peter Falk. She was my Solveig Dommartin, I her Bruno Ganz. We didn’t clutter our short relationship with sex. We crept through the remnants of Norwich’s ancient city wall as though we were defecting in 80s Berlin to the promise of the West, which somehow felt pertinent in Norfolk, geographically at least, even if not ideologically. We sat on armchairs carried from charity shops in the heart of the wasteland at Anglia Square, our own pre-re-development Potsdamer Platz flanked with flyovers and traffic calming measures and history crushed beneath mistaken policies, Berlin’s infamous graffiti poorly replicated on our local government-allocated fascias with the principles stripped away, soullessly marking territory with paint cans and illiteracy as the new scent glands, a Sisyphean attempt to come to terms with mortality – to beat it with the permanence of spray paint – that could at least keep them busy until the inevitable, this endless futile spraying, their pigmented particulates carried off by the terrible wind in faintly coloured gusts before a mark was even made. In shirtsleeves I held the ropes she would swing from, looped over lampposts in quiet streets undisturbed by police. We strode the library’s first floor in overcoats attempting to tune into the internal conversations of the handful of readers who littered the leatherette suites, but they were silenced by bored librarians as soon as they opened their mouths, and the elderly seemed fearful of the length of our coats, as though we planned to strike terror into the hearts of the reading public with an unimaginable devotion to the discreet eavesdropping of their routine conversations, of the simmering profundity of shopping lists or worsening health issues or unquestioned nationalism. We preserved reality itself with endless rolls of monochrome film in old manual SLRs, and we were struck by how each of our hundreds of photographs was so tedious or lonely but was so important because of it, and we stuck them all to my bedroom wall and felt like we had transcended time. When we heard about Peter Falk on the news she clutched my arm and cried as though each of her family had died of simultaneously befallen traumatic injuries, a car crash or gas explosion. His was a horrendous death. The almost-greatest American detective ridden with dementia following dental procedures. It didn’t make any sense. We waited for the headlines: “what would Columbo say?”; “just one more thing... what was I saying?”; “solve this one”; “FALK DEAD! (also Columbo, by association)”; but they ran with gravity: “Columbo actor dies aged 83.” “He wasn’t just Columbo but an angel also,” I said. Ass-backwards. Glass eye. Brando tongue. Virgo Jew. Jesus, Peter Falk: when you died you didn’t even know who the fuck Columbo was. The one thing you couldn’t preserve was always going to be yourself. I put the supermarket pizza into the oven and we re-watched the scene where he talks about how it feels to smoke and have coffee, and we sat at either end of the sofa. There could be no romance without Peter Falk; no memories either – just endless empty time. We watched the scene over and over until the pizza was ready; I sliced it badly into six uneven pieces and put them all onto one plate. She stayed in the front room listening to Peter Falk. When I went back in she had set fire to the corners of the curtains and the armchair and a couple of parts of the carpet and they were slowly starting to catch, intense orange flames flaring behind the thick black smoke from the artificial fibres. She was crying and watching the plumes of smoke and Peter Falk was saying “there’s so many good things”, and I led her to the sofa and we sat down and ate the pizza carefully, just as we imagined Peter Falk would. We talked with the pizza; it felt like the first time we had ever talked, and we both agreed that this – us – wasn’t going to work out. It wasn’t that kind of thing, we agreed, and it felt terrific to agree, and the fire swept through the house. And we ate pizza from that one plate, and watched Peter Falk who had died the day before.

10. Jim’s Band

In the erotic weeks of the media’s new century, of everyday sexuality made public through continuously blogged thoughts and contradictory broadsheet polls – filthy angels sanctified hairless vaginal declivities! heroic iron pectorals pointing ever downward in lines of defined muscle to modified similarly iron cocks smooth as rubber, literally or almost! – whose goal was to purify the brute out of congress, cleansing the nation’s final sweaty hump and trembling-kneed bunk-up into the endless tedious annals of normalcy and social acceptability, the violent romance and mystery of fingers and secretions and tights patches of sensitive skin at first touch unrecognisable in the dark instead made a point of public record and expectation, an hygienic and sellable commodity rendered sterile by creams, washes and feminine fragrances that dulled the essential odours of life until the taboo of merged genitalia could be stultified into afternoon TV material (“you can even do it on a semi-crowded city bus route, so perfect are your genitals”; “please do objectify your children’s currently ill-developed future bits, it is both normal and proscribed by the consensus formed by your voting choice to protect future investments, appendages &c.”). In the Bortholinian depths of staunch carnal fanaticism that grew from our great British repressiveness he – Jim – was humiliated by police investigations of his preposterously flaccid hard drive – just a few Word and Excel docs, family photographs, no more than a handful of MP3 files (mostly repetitive positive mantras looped over archaic string instruments or Christian-focused spiritual self-help dictations) – and scribed onto the Nonviolent and Asexual Offender Register (or, absurdly, NonviAsOr). He was a marauding Christian whose ethical considerations pertaining to the sanctity of the physical body, love and Christ the saviour left him harshly opposed to not only sexual promiscuity but also the commodification of sexual intimacy – or more specifically the social expectation to be sexual in every aspect of life both public and private, both in- or outside of a nominated bedroom facility – that had flourished with the boom of late-capitalist media giants who had ironically achieved far greater results than any economic revolution had managed before them in making people – all people! – believe that everyone deserved everything, particularly surgically-enhanced sex organs and a constant stream of sterile sexual intercourse that like a film unfurled plotlessly and with negligible human interaction and was unmarred by mess or unpleasantness of any kind physical or otherwise and that was instead simply two hyper-stylized husks of what was ostensibly just sculpted genital meat rubbing clinically together with all the urgency and beautiful smut of a couple of shrink-wrapped androgynous plastic dolls, photographed and uploaded before it had even happened, the coldness of the act somehow washed out by the impeccably high definition of the pixel-count that made minor stars of even the most pointless amateurs. The contradiction of their idiocy made him reach for his dead sister’s Bible in desperation. They professed a moral abhorrence of both sexual intercourse as a genital act – it was horrible and nasty and perverted and wrong, something to hide behind MDF doors and be ashamed of as an unfortunate occasional necessity, an unavoidable component of reluctant conjugality, the Augustinian procreative method – and as a theoretical or visually represented aesthetic yet conversely also idolised the same – so long as it was sterile and glamorous and acceptably distanced from the tedium of their own bedsheets, which left the real sex of moving parts loathed and the plastic sex of mass media doctrine worshipped at like a flawless flesh altar. They wanted to shelter their children from the reality of sex, to punish their erroneous adolescent hormones and to petition against institutionalised sex education, all its talk of penises and vaginas and choice so grimly believable, but thrust them into a world of Lolita-brand child beds and padded bras for the early teens; they condemned the terrible vulgarity of page three girls – never the advocated chirping ignorance of same – then gave waxing tips for euphemistically named body areas in girls magazines and derided anything but complete hairlessness. It was make-up they wanted, spread like camouflage over every imaginable organ, sanitary congress entirely free of the truth. This Jim found objectionable. He had started a campaign, Jim’s Band, and threw rallies in community centres across the city, promoting abstinence to rooms of baying thirty-something men whose very facial expressions spelt out free internet pornography around their cans of tepid Fosters, and grave young mothers whose magazine choices and idle dreams of labiaplasty sat uneasily with the £3.50 they had given Jim’s male assistant for a shitty silver abstinence ring for their under-tens. He alluded to the Bible abstractly but knew it was pointless in his secular misery. His rants against sexual commodity became increasingly impassioned, and he promoted what he called observable abstinence; that is, abstaining from the observable facets (i.e. pictorial representations [of genitals so removed from life to have been constructed in controlled laboratories and extracted for the shoot only moments before], [poorly] written articles, television quiz shows, &c.) of sexualized social norms by not allowing oneself to succumb to media expectations. “Allow children to be children”, he implored, arms outstretched, “without a wide sexual vocabulary still meaningless to the limits of their own physical development; allow yourselves to be happy with your physical lot, to relish the God-given idiosyncrasy of your conventionally abnormal genitalia or erogenous pieces; do not fetishize the perfect non-drip intercourse of your perfume advertisers three minute narratives, where declivities smooth as dolphins heads conjoin in sweat-less filtered light, for this is not even a myth but a lie; the absurdity of our promiscuous culture must cease lest our future sexual expectations become even further perverted by the wicked desires of our media barons.” The mood at the rallies was sour from the beginning; no one wanted to be told what they were doing wrong by a stranger, condemning everything they held dear: the Friday night fingering in the pub car park; the Saturday morning wank over the fashion pages of the broadsheet glossies; the deafening innuendo hollered by an entire pissed demographic like prayer above the dire music of chain wine-bars, alluding with increasing impropriety to the joyless horrors of the pending inevitable and sniggering blushing into their mates ear that someone’s looking over; the nipple slips and bared buttocks of the great night out; the tearful kid inexplicably slathered in orange like a fancy-dress shoe, the acceptable face of child molestation; the double-espresso glugged over the full bikini wax. His fourth rally of the week was in Catton Grove, and due to bad planning was still going on at pub closing time. A small crowd of Baptists and one or two young couples soon swelled to about forty people, all filling up polystyrene beakers with thin tea and sachet after sachet of sugar, laughing loudly every time Jim mentioned sexual intercourse. He kicked the flipchart over – just thick fibre-tipped text saying NO was all he wrote at all the rallies – and his voice started quivering with the impotence of his own celibacy; he pointed at individuals stretched like proven dough into pastel polo shirts or short sleeved supermarket cotton, berated them with a really intense attention to detail, told them the media sanctioned genitalia they set as their wallpaper or numerically valued excitedly spluttering out crisp crumbs in pub debates was making loveless bastards of them all, was stripping all the warmth and beauty out of the sexual act and leaving it as clinical as surgery. Made whores and outlaws of their children. They were told to desire lies and they lapped it up like a pack of wankers, he said, vaguely crossing himself with every expletive; they might as well shit onto every page of the Bible. “Shit on every page of the Bible,” he commanded. When the police showed up Jim had taken to his knees and was still yelling but the words were unidentifiable, just noises, collections of glottal syllabic gasps, the crowd silent but bored and refusing to leave for reasons they wouldn’t consider for days afterwards. The officers couldn’t believe the nerve of the man. He was arrested on charges of asexual harassment, as well as intent to incite abstinence, destructive self-discipline suggestive of mania, and the wilful and disorderly public condemnation of harmlessly arousing media portrayals and the associated expectations as translated to the sexual attitudes, preferences and normalized desires of the average twat on the street. The stigma of his asexual tendencies would be a matter of public declaration from thereon in, on job and credit applications; he was a danger to the industry. Nauseated by the deviant sex acts of the working classes the two policemen proudly compared laminated photographs of their wives designer vulvas and gave detached assessments of their value – monetary and aesthetic – to unspoken criteria as though they were appliances, and Jim prayed for deliverance from the packaged sexual commodity, an ideological intercourse now strictly a pursuit of the rich, the poor far too ugly for carnal experience. Filthy bastard dreams of discharge, they chuckled into their notes, their own genitals sterile in the vacuum of their underwear.

11. Happy Ever After

It had been his dream since youth: a Chinese restaurant. Didn’t have a Chinese bone in his body – just Scotch/English with Fallen Catholic parentage – but neither did Uncle Ben. That’s what his mother had said, the subtly racist implication being that to be Chinese was of no fundamental or necessary value (to wit: was essentially a purely linguistic – rather than characteristic – distinction of occidental construction that required no grounding in Chinese history, culture or demography and was at best a determination in the culinary sense and certainly not resultant of any birthright either jus soli or jus sanguinis in claim). Uncle Ben was purportedly the African-American agricultural whizz of rice growth, the Johnny Appleseed of perennial cereals and starches, who – bow-tied! be-suited! – transcended his slave status and attained self-endorsed (but US government approved) nationalized Chinese status through generalized Western culinary interpretations of oriental food aspects, through sweet and sour sauce production and the parboiled rice commodity; he could do it because he – that grin!, the grin that would be inappropriate or even perverse or doltish on a younger guy, an arrestable doped grin exemplifying in its gentle inanity the reasonable suspicion to justify unwarranted police interference if facially present on an African-American youth circa the present, etc. – was of the west, rendered so by the punishing capitalist regime of nutritious worldwide suppertimes, because he (the generic he, as in: the royal we) made the narrative. His mother and he had eaten chow mein several times a week and lost themselves in its soy sauce. At night he dreamed of water chestnuts and pak choi, of incisions in his skin that in an uncanny act of will poured noodles into the world, all stir-fried and plated up as they hastily emerged from a handful of newly tailored orifices labelled with intricate Chinese characters whose meanings eluded him. If as the old adagial concoction goes ‘there are two loves in every man’s life’ (or something to that polygamous effect, although the love can of course refer to both a symbolic and/or intellectual and/or abstract – and as such pertaining to the intangible and the non-anthropic – understanding of the terminology, as well as a physical even carnal allusion to the material male/female binary), then Chinese cuisine was one of them. The other was the music of the Beatles. He chose to play “A Day in the Life” at his poor mother’s funeral; towards the end of the song the vicar looked nauseous, and barked in the last thirty seconds to the tape operator, “turn it off; please turn it off immediately,” and the silence that filled the space left by the disorientating loop was incredibly uncomfortable. The vicar’s face was streaked with blood vessels and small pools of saliva had gathered angrily in the corners of his mouth which he wiped on the sleeve of his vestments. He had expected a hymn for the end of the service but the son chose “Julia”, his mother’s name. It was unorthodox, even more so because of the preserved body that was displayed by the altar standing – or rather mounted – upright in a climate-controlled glass case like V. I. Lenin and overseeing the whole ceremony with a cold and imperceptibly crooked stare (he had not wanted the eyelids to be stitched carefully together as most people do, haunted as they were by the perceived fundamental life and essence – the real memories – associated with that most personal organ, but irrespective of technique or protocol or any kind of cadaverous semblance of personhood or morality, embalmers simply could not prevent the decomposition of the soft tissues of the two organic eyeballs, so he had requested instead the use of two pretty artistically convincing glass eyes in a considered shade of blue that unfortunately didn’t sit quite right in the orbit and drooped some with the death of the whole thing beneath lids tacked discreetly to the skin immediately above and below). Inside the case she was looped onto an industrial steel bar at three key points up the length of her body, and the conditions were monitored by sensors and required a constant temperature of 16˚C with an 80-90 per cent humidity to prevent decomposition, and daily he had to moisturise the features and inject further preservatives on top of the already performed arterial and cavity embalming. They were rituals he would soon absorb into his own daily routine and even look forward to, and he felt a real closeness to his mother as he carefully undertook these ablutions for her and eased the hypodermic under her clothes with an almost erotic tenderness. Everyone agreed that at fifty-five she had died too young. At the end of the funeral a couple of the mourners, people who he didn’t recognise but who seemed to know his mother quite well, helped him lift his mother in the large glass case onto a flat-bed trolley and wheel her into the car park; a wedding party was arriving over the street and when they saw his mother their eyes burned with hatred and also sadness. They shifted her into the back of a minibus taxi which had the seats removed at his instruction and strapped some lengths of rope around the case to hold it in a steady position, and he left after cursory handshakes, the taxi ride strained and unpleasant. With the payoff from her life insurance policy he decided to open a Chinese takeaway in the suburbs, as both he and his mother had always known he would, in memoriam. It was an unspoken agreement between them that exemplified their shared passion for both the sweet and the sour, and through a combination of the takeaway restaurant – a lasting remembrance of past dinners enjoyed – and the companionship of his mother’s preserved dead body he thought it would be as though she had never died at all. He bought the premises outright and moved into the flat above the takeaway space below. It had been a kebab shop before that, and the vendors had agreed to leave him some of the kitchen equipment: stainless steel refrigerators, hot plates, a large glass fronted counter, a griddle still congealed with the encrusted fat of a thousand shish kebabs and discount patties. He cleaned it all up as best he could and kitted out the kitchen area behind with eight-hob ranges and deep fat fryers and two or three microwave ovens. He called the place ‘We Can Wok It Out’, his hand-painted signage combining staples of Chinese marketing – pagoda, oriental-styled Latinate lettering, wok, Chinese characters of indeterminate meaning – with a part-convincing silhouette of the fab four themselves. The name had just come to him one night: ‘We Can Wok It Out’. It’s a brilliant pun, he thought, and laughed when the sign was erected above the window. He had no menus or chefs in place for the grand opening because he didn’t know anything about Chinese cuisine apart from that he loved the taste of those Uncle Ben’s sauces and Vesta chow mein’s with the crispy noodle topping. The opening of the Chinese restaurant was about something far more personal and complex than the provision of Chinese food to paying customers; it was a chance for his mother and he to still be together. With his preserved mother’s corpse overlooking the barren counter and the empty spotless kitchen – a Fu-Manchu moustache drawn meticulously onto her unyielding formaldehyde features and her skin lovingly yellowed-up with restorative artistes L’Oreal and a tailor-made cheongsam tied in loose knots at the back, in front of the industrial steel mounting bar – it reminded him of the old times. What greater mark of respect to both his mother’s short life and to western notions of the orient could there be? No crowd gathered as first he unlocked the door. He just played Beatles tapes on an old two-deck tape recorder and spoke to his mother’s body, and would later heat up a couple of Uncle Ben’s meals of rice and sauce in the microwaves. “There is peace in these tiles,” he said to her preserved self. “And something grandiose in the sterility of unused caterers’ stainless steel. Surfaces that shimmer in strip fluorescence.” He wept as he spoke because of the perfection. Some groups of teenagers had started lingering outside as the evening went on; they peered through the window at the yellowed-up dead body and squealed with equal parts excitement and disgust, then disappeared only to show up again later with parents, who came into the takeaway and told him that he was sick and that what he was doing was wrong and that they would have him closed down because of health and safety, and he nodded at their points and listened to his Beatles tapes and eventually they left him to it and swore as they closed the door behind them. At nine o’clock he put two Chinese microwave meals into heat, then carefully spooned the scalding food onto two plates, one each for him and his mother. He opened up the glass case in which her body was mounted and unfastened her from the supporting steel bar. She slumped forwards into his arms and he propped her into a soft chair; when she looked comfortable he parted her cold lips and put a forkful of the sweet and sour chicken into her mouth. Of course it just stayed there unchewed and unswallowed, then fell in hot lumps down her frontage. He watched her and had a forkful of the food himself. It tasted really delicious. “Different worlds,” he said, because things had changed some but were really the same as well. That was just how things were. He held his mother close to him and they ate the food together.

the sexual reminiscences of Charles Philip Havelock III, no. 4

2011-04-10T15:01:00.003+01:00

I will always recall with fondness my initiation into a vivid world of exchanges of the carnal persuasion, recall it like a parent’s death or an infant’s birth – for it was a birth, of sorts, my own birth, a rebirth into a brighter world; I paid witness to my own emergence, like an insect from its chrysalis; I felt the death of one self (this self past, virginal, sexlessly afflicted, dulled, numbed from the experiential), & the growth of another from the flowers of climax, of completion, from the labyrinthine routes of the female body’s own internal structures – O Order! & Perfection! O the maddening COMPLEXITY of the celestial construction!, how you curve weaving through this most physical tract and into ETERNITY, and run like tributaries, be-ridged and multi-faceted! Invite me to your essence with your watery communications, my fingers slipping through your introductions, your trivialities! Let us interact SILENTLY, in a language without sound, for the vulgarity of words so impedes the urgency with which our bodies conjoin! In our oppositional genitals lies the immaculate! The scales fell from my eyes as I swooned in the musky whiff of those silky folds, like the fronds of some paradisiacal flora. I felt God and life enter my body in equal measure. I burned with the life of INTERCOURSE! In the vaginas – their variation as abundant as the faces of the city streets, as distinctive as a fingerprint – of my formative years I was struck with the force of a pleasure so great that my very soul was torn from within, separated from myself and given person – sentient! delirious! – left limp in the hands of the great Eros, who in my vulnerability, drained by the milking of my own seminal production, soothed me into a lifetime of determined emissions, gave meaning back to my ephemeral soul, first lost but then found at once, saved from the enormity of my own coital abyss, I felt this INVIGORATED meaning, divine and true, the power of God Himself at work through my member and at once aflame in this ravaged soul. I had found God in flagrante delicto.

I had twelve years existence to my name – C. P. “Pippin” Havelock III – at the time of my first glossy expulsion. Brushing the warm hand of Christ, as it were and would be. One September Sunday my father established me visit with himself to one of the city’s many bawdy houses (the granting of public access to a given set of genitals being as it was something of a fashionable offering to gentleman of a certain class, as the Havelock’s had always been; in point of fact the undertaking of such a prostitutive act was most highly esteemed in all of the better bred circles, an expectation, almost, certainly an act of status and high standing, the more exceptional – in congressional manner, to wit, DEVIANT – the better) to “make manly my resultant young”, as he had guffawed beyond the chewed wood of his tobacco pipe. My father was a gruff and intimidating man, the whole of his visible body enshrouded in a lush coat of white hair of varying thicknesses, his features harshly etched into the iron-red face of a youth spent at sea (in captaincy, I hasten to proffer) with the ancient historicity of fossils in limestone. He had little time for his enemies and even less for his friends, but remained nonetheless a pillar of Norwich’s business community, patron of a thousand bordellos and owner of one, landowner, councillor, master baker, gentleman. A man of modest height – five feet and three in stocking paws, an oft-parodied fact in the satirical artworks of the locally produced juvenilia of the turn of the century, by which point my father had, soused in cognac, imbibed himself into little more than a caricature of his own best features, the butt of an abundance of two-faced jibes (for drunk or not he would have had their cocks had they dared make a buffoon of him in person) – but exceptional torso, he barked sentences forth like cannon fire and commanded servility in every mannerism. He led me to the alley once called Gropekuntelane, which alone housed three such establishments and which I had visited with him before in a resolutely onanistic sense, where my appendage had been left raw by the persistence of the spirit and my own attentive touch while I had waited in thrall for my father to culminate his business (for in any given visit my father was likely to undertake as many as five such professional relationships with as many of the variant personnel. Please do not misunderstand me, for my father was deeply committed to mother and they shared a truthful relationship, fully aware of the others respective foibles. For my father, coital interaction was as embedded in his person as any other trait and my mother loved him regardless, perhaps because of it. His nightly visitations occurred with her blessing, and her own genitals received a similar level of attention from the curious boys of the villages – these were fifteen, sixteen year olds, their country ears large and hair shorn short, the youthfulness of their enraptured and curious members the source of endless amusement for my mother both anecdotally and physically. Like a champion farmer she expertly coaxed the seed from their tips, watched them gasp their childhoods onto her mottled white skin, had them follow the paths trodden down by their friends, who discussed it afterwards – as men, not boys – with Cox’s and tin cups of beer. I dare say that more than a fair portion of Norfolk’s manhood must have discovered the movements of woman in my childhood parlour, my mother’s be-veined thighs offering passage to the darkened contortions of the heavy cunt between, its labial protrusions like thick ribbons left in celebration of life, my life!), left intrigued as I was by the lithe forms of these ladies of the night, who careened about the premises in all of their painted finery, the flesh of their breasts moving with tantalising waves of recognition and mercy, I left blushing with an erection of such ferocity that even cold water could not dislodge it from its prominence within the fabric of my trouser, and as these ladies did move about the room, with their feminine ejaculations of sonorous laughter and their shapely volumes, their heavenly posteriors like the SPHERES themselves, I felt the spirit awaken within me – as though a candle had been struck alight in the very depths of my human soul, a candle that would burn strong and bright for the whole of my life, and that only the most delicate flower of the female form might ever satisfy, enshrouding me in the moisture – like morning dew – of its scarlet folds; how many times I took my leave to the lavatory that night, refuting the angels whom so pulsed their energies through the length of my stiffness, expelling my silk into the liberty of the free world!, but this was to be my first participatory visit, the balance of my father’s devoted credit account at the urgent disposal of my very whims. On arrival our topcoats were whisked from our shoulders without a second to ruminate and straight to the cloakroom with a somewhat daunting sense of social propriety, and with salutations and mild pleasantries we were encouraged to the bar where my father might concede to his ‘other vice’, a full bottle of Mr Myers’s FINEST molasses derived rum from the Jamaican Isles, an importation made by the box-load specifically on order of my father’s accountant, an obedient man who went to the most extraordinary lengths in his service of my father’s comforts. As we walked through the dimly lit room – its lanterns shaded in red-tinted glass and oozing with the warmth of the flesh to which the very building had martyred itself, the tables dotted with fragile candle flame, each on the cusp of extinction from the gusty force of a laughter, here, an elaborate fondle, there (for although the proprietors made every effort to insist upon the conduct of any act of copulation [or pre-copulation] behind the curtained doors of the provided rooms in the allocated higher storeys, suffice it to say that for many of the gentleman patrons there present – well to do men, one and all, wealthy champions of local trade and business, philanthropists, BUILDERS OF A NEW NORWICH CITY, pioneers of the Rotary Club who relished in the wilful abandon of the coital union, of the sacrifice of self to the inexplicable, the ineffable, the overpowering religiosity of climax, weak-kneed at the Godliness of that ancient physical act – it was the public nature of their purchased carnality that provided the most significant arousal [in short they wanted their appendages displayed, exhibits in a museum of TRUTH]) – my father nodded at acquaintances, business associates, each flanked by at least two females whose laughter mirrored their own with only the slightest delay, like an echo, their soft experienced flesh milk white amidst the light of the room and emerging persistently from beneath corsets and meticulously engineered undergarments, each man aglow with the public secrecy of their nocturnal excursions. My father refreshed his tobacco pipe and unfastened his suit jacket, then at once took seat at the bar, his heavy head engulfed in the smoke of his own making. To the barwoman’s delight – a rake thin female whose prominent ribs jutted from her torso with an angle more acute than her shapeless bare breasts could muster, smaller than a child’s but with the most curious nipples, the shape and colour of late autumnal acorns, browned by the cooling temperatures; I found something oddly alluring about her androgenised frame, a body so like my own, and behind the white lace undergarments that retained her most precious asset, her musky tunnel, enfolded around the caressing fingers of my imagination, suckled to exquisite mania by the tongue and lips of my dreams!, behind that very undergarment I could see a triangular cluster of thick dark hair, its unkempt strands edging towards the silken perimeter and jutting honestly above in a faint line towards her navel, as was my own burgeoning pubis, and her youthful sexuality and taut tender body struck me violently like some ESSENCE of LIFE, and I felt the blood rushing from head (oh Mr Meyers, purveyor of the most superior devices of inebriation, I thank you from my Godly soul!) as I swooned on my stool, and from there it went in an instant to my appendage, which swelled to a breathtaking capacity within the fabric of my clothing, and with one hand in my trouser pocket I did clutch at its length, part to subdue its ferocity, part to stimulate it, the self-same conflict between such binary oppositions as I have devoted at least part of my adult life to confronting, wilfully – he swallowed a good sized glass of the deep golden liquid without delay, and poured another for himself and a smaller glass for me, which I sipped at tentatively, the alcohol burning through my oesophagus and into my belly, a hollow vacuum from hunger and pangs of terror at my imminent deflowering, my uncapping. She leaned over the bar towards my father, her immense dark nipples beating with the movement like a hypnotic metronome before my eyes.

“Mr Havelock sir,” she said, her slender fingers circling the tip of our depleted rum bottle. Her teeth hung crooked from her gums, evidentially constructing her youthful hardships, tainted yellow from tea and the chewing tobacco so prevalent in establishments such as this. She drew one slight hand down the length of my father’s scrupulously shaven cheek as she spoke to him. “Pleasure again sir.”

“Ah, strumpet!” he said, a-boom, in retaliation. “A delight it is mine to emit. And may I as ever compliment you on the exhibition of your intriguing breasts.” And with both hands clasped behind the jutting plates of her shoulder blades he pulled her yet further across the bar, so her feet were near raised up from the floor beneath her, and lapped his huge tongue drily up her flat chest and over a piercing nipple. “Now step back and let me have a look at you. A proper look.”

She poured him a fresh tumbler of the rum and he cracked the bowl of his tobacco pipe against the bar, emptying its deadened ashes to the cold stone floor, measuring fresh leaves into the bowl with precise fingers and patting them down firmly. Our hostess then took three steps back from the bar and paraded her torso the better for my father’s examination. He nodded thoughtfully at her slightly skeletal build and struck a match to his pipe. I, meanwhile, felt my face flush with the exposure to something so very beautiful, felt my appendage pulsing like a breathing organism of its own sentience, forcefully demanding the attention it considered it its right to receive. I shifted uncomfortably, the prominence of my stiffened part burning with an unaccountable shame into every gesture I made.

“Very good,” my father, said, “very good indeed.” I noticed that he, too, had one finger tracing a circular line around the genital opening of his own tweed trouser.

“Pleased to oblige you, sir,” she said, her vocal tones an awkward bastard of the demure, the sultry and the crudely lengthened vowels of the Eat Anglian dialectics. With slow blinks she edged her undergarments eight or nine inches down over her buttocks, over the pubic mound and its dark wiry coverings, and – scarlet lips spread broadly in an inviting smile – she used one steady hand to rub at the musky sanctuary that gasped between her boyish thighs. I had to turn to my father for fear of screaming aloud and saw his mouth hung agape beneath the moustache. With middle and index fingers she carefully pulled the flesh in an upward manner and revealed the labial intricacies of her very OPENING, the majora thick and protruding, as individual as one’s very nose, or ears, or eyes, and somehow so misplaced on this girl who otherwise had not an ounce of superfluous skin to her entire body; the minora revealed behind the viscous secretions that emerged like the nocturnal, creeping to prominence in the dusk of her self-induced arousal, revealing even the pinkish tip of her clitoral organ around which her fingers had settled, ensconced about the genital and subtly caressing its each side as one. Her eyes had taken a slightly vacant look and her lips had parted, mirroring their vaginal counterpoint. I peered from one corner of my otherwise averted eyes, for though this exhibition was occurring so publically I still felt, at this stage in my carnal pursuits, somewhat intrusive in allowing myself to be privy to revelations of such immediacy, as though I had somehow gained entry to this place by illicit means, and was instead voyeuristically watching some personal relationship unfold, and not the professional unity – by which I mean an exchange of BODILY goods for an agreed and fair sum of financial reward, in accordance with the clearly demarcated and written rules of the house in question – it did in fact represent, and as I watched I felt the longing of what my childish naiveté did then consider love, yes how I loved that woman, in thought and imagination even if not in the misery of the real! How I loved her imperfect face that so illuminated the earthliness, the very transience of the physical bar with all of the light of heaven! How I loved her cunt (forgive me if you wish, I care nothing, for I truly believe that the urgency of such incivilities – the coarseness of their linguistic constructions, their ancient heritage in our carnal histories – to be vital in matters of the sex, to express passion with all of the immense gravity it so demands!) revealed to me for the first time – of any, for this was my earliest cunt, and not even a touch, a whiff, a taste! – in this very moment! O how I loved her! – how I thought I did. I felt the movement of my loins and the whirling of my stomach and I thought that this must be the love I had read so much about. Of course now the differentiation is clear, and the feelings I had for this skinny barmaid were but blind lust, a physical yearning for vagina, for my own seminal release at the hands of another and not my own, but let me have my folly. It is but short lived, and I but twelve years, the cusp of loveless intercourse upon me.

A sip of my rum shook me from my reverie and I grimaced at its heat on my throat, and turned to my father’s stool, which now sat empty beside me. In an instant of panic I stood and looked in a frenzy about the room for his familiar stature, and finally saw him being lead by the very same barmaid through the door to the stairs. She had removed all of her remaining undergarments between here and there, and in small bare footsteps completely unclothed – I could almost make out the dark entryway to her vagina with every parting of her legs in stride, nestling at the base of her buttocks’ curve like the longed-for vision of a harbour in the night, such masterful design of immediate access! – she held one of his hands, the other clutching the rum bottle, and led him out of sight, privy to his copulative perversions (for we all have them) and responding to the moustachioed kisses he placed upon her pale thin shoulders with caresses reached back around behind her to his own no doubt swollen – and still be-trousered, for although perhaps the cities most experienced cocksman, my father was nonetheless comparatively political with the precise dimensions and visibility of his key genital part, granting exposure only to those intent on receiving it, to wit: his (numerous) carnal partners, a personal principle in which he took an extraordinary pride, but which I myself never entirely understood – appendage, which she managed with the sleek and masterful touches of a consummate professional. As I turned to return to my stool, left somewhat despondent by my father’s betrayal of my incredible love – which I already felt dwindling, such is the transience of such youthful infatuation, that very male need to be WITHIN something – and by that point certain that my own carnal initiation would now be unattended to for yet another week, lacking as I did the confidence to approach any one of these experts to propose the conduct and terms of their trade with the rights of the customer behind me, as I turned I was confronted by a woman of such staggering – yet somehow rather coarse – beauty that I almost fell backwards. She stood I imagine at least six feet tall, her long red hair left to curl around either side of her slightly equestrian face, which was long with a hard thin nose right down its centre, but party to such large blue eyes and a thick but delicate mouth that she seemed a most perfect amalgamation of the finest parts of both the human and animal kingdoms, in a way that aroused me to a near uncomfortable level. I tried as best I could to rest my hands over the bulge of my glans, but her warm eyes followed my movements and her lips curled into the slightest smile at their edge.

“Master Havelock is it?” she said. Her voice rang through me like music. Would she be the one?

“Charles Phillip, the Third,” I said. My voice embarrassed me, spoke more of my age than any uncontrollable erection ever could have. “But I call me Pippin.”

“I see,” she said, eyes now fixed to my own. She was exquisitely dressed, her dark black corset striking against white skin and rich red hair. I yearned to see the hair on her pubis, to see if its colour were as red as that which framed her face, to feel the flesh of her buttocks, to part them gently and inspect the cunt and even the anus they protected, to bury my head in the immense breasts – not flat and male like my former love, from whose very existence I already felt separated by generations! – whose areola I could see edging above the cups of her corset. “I am Elizabeth,” she said, extending a hand for me to take. I kissed it softly, raised a gentleman. “I am the madam here. Your father is a very popular customer. My ladies find him... charming. We are all very keen to discover your similarities.” She looked at my left hand, which I still had placed softly atop my erection. “Do you like what you see?” she said softly. I could only nod, my face flushing terribly with self-consciousness and desire. “Unfortunately, I myself do not conduct transactions with my customers. Although you seem a sweet boy.” She approached me and touched my face with one finger, smiled at its softness, and then proceeded to unfasten my trousers. As afraid as I was I neither dared nor wanted to prohibit her from doing so, and at once I felt the cool breeze of the main bar room upon the rigid form of my hungry shaft. She refrained from touching the genital itself, but stepped back to observe it the better. “You are your father’s son,” she said (although whether complimentary in spirit I remain – to this day! – uncertain), and took me by the hand, leading me away from the bar and to another room, this one filled with sofas, ottomans and candles, the walls hung with tapestries, oil paintings and carnal portraiture, all donations from the estates of the many wealthy patrons who acted as benefactors for the continued business of the establishment, all the while my still rigid member (for would this aching rod ever again succumb to a flaccid state?, so engorged was it with the blood of my very soul, and so defiantly vertical it stood, itself an arrow trained towards the heavens whose Holy brilliance it would reveal through its inter-genital immersion!) jutted obtrusively from the tailored frontal split in my trouser covering. Through a door on the other side of the room came a group of five women – who must have been in waiting for such an occurrence as this in some anteroom, preparing their presentation for their latest customers measured selection – of varying physical properties and proportions. Their madam had them lined before me, each adorned in only the slightest of fabrics and revealing differing amounts of their experienced bodies. The African lady instantly caught my eye, as well you might imagine – Norwich was, at that time, home to few blacks, and none so stunning as this. She stood a head above me, naked as a tribesman, and her countenance flared with a near-manic allure, borne as she was of the savage continent; her vast ebony buttocks pulsed with every one of her slight movements, her dark eyes were deep set with the mystery, the uncertainty, the distrust prevalent in her race, and beneath her slightly parted red-painted lips shone teeth as white as ivory; her breasts hung struggling under their own immense weight – O pitch areola! How like spilt ink to the canvas! – and took a near triangular form at their tip, tapering as they did with the angles of a curious sexual geometry; she eyed my swollen glans (from whose meatus a single semenic tear had by this point emerged, my youthful ejaculatory persistence then still unmastered) hungrily – a professional woman to the letter! – and, observing my desire at its material apex, soon proceeded to part her long dark legs, lined somehow gracefully with the terrifying musculature of an animal, and reveal to the room her most intimate part, thick labium as black as night, the pink bud they secreted behind their curtain of flesh all the more vibrant because of it. I felt madam’s gaze penetrating through me with an unappealing impatience, and moved my attentions to the next lady in this défilé de la chair. The second of the five was flushed with the air of a good country girl, her hair cropped short around her ruddy cheeks, her misaligned teeth creeping out from between her lips with a sensual allure; I noted dried blood beneath her long fingernails – an abattoir girl? farmhand? – and a faint tinge of long-dried soil about her forearms, a dirtiness that – far from unappealing – made some part of me clench with possibility. I envisaged her on her knees on a wet afternoon, her gingham skirts pulled up as if a cummerbund about the round stomach of a strong woman, propped in the mud on one elbow that ground into the soft earth – whose grass was trampled within – with all the pleasure of existence behind it, both her breasts prized forth from their covering and sunk into the mud, her other hand threaded between the bob of her thighs – themselves like the cuts of meat she hung to cure – and delving hungrily into her salty slice, emboldened and empurpled in the saturation of the East Anglian rains!, fingers swallowed to the knuckle, the sound of the falling raindrops like revenant applause, and into that frothy chalice I would edge just the very crest of myself, feel the warmth of her life about only my tip, and the ancient broads would be felt throughout our union, and I would buck my seed forth and away, her hand enfolding my two testicles, contracting towards my body with the desperate release her vagina had proffered. A girl who would not wash the mud from her knees! Unashamed by the physical truths of her humanity! Revelling in the organic perfumes of a soiled cunt unwashed for fortnights! She wore her stains like medals, tangible memories, physical reminders of experience past. Her literal immersion within the filth of nature made her seem to me so real, so distant from myself and my own paltry understanding; her heart here burned with the abandon of wilderness, unfettered by the weight of an urban existence; her very life was lived as some physical entity, moulded by tangibility, and coitus formed only one part of it – for her the limitless possibilities of the sexual exchange harboured no divine secrets, no essential revelation; the holy spirit did not dwell for her within the swollen member, the greased anus, the accommodating vagina but in ALL of the physical world. Her god resided not only in seminal outpourings but in faeces, in urine, in violence, in consumption, in tears, in laughter, in the very mechanics of the corporeal sphere!, and thus – alas – for I, who felt – and needed to feel – the beating heart of the very Godhead in every shred of union, the engulfing divinity through considered acts of physical congress, and despite her tangible earthen beauty – as if rooted upward from the very bowels of our most beautiful county Norfolk, a beauty fed and that shone by the mighty waters of our beaten forebears pasts, their sodden histories of the natural struggle for reclamation – I foresaw that our genital union was not, this time, to be, even as her hand worked effortlessly around the curvature of her barely covered breasts. With a regretful smile my eyes fell upon the third of the women, and I knew at once in epiphany, in revelation, that it were her, that she would be the one to show me Christ’s own way, truth, light. She bore a remarkable resemblance to my mother – whose profound vagina I had oft heard tall tale told, its remarkable enveloping, its oyster musk, a channel – and like every cunt! – to the very hub of the life of the world, to the holy womb that bore us all to birth, o mighty cunt, swallow me and make of me pure ESSENCE, take me from time and show me INFINITY, the elasticity of your walls are the eyes to the universe! – and I found something striking in her advancing years. While her face retained its beauty – in full lips that parted under my gaze, in the thick tresses that framed her certain countenance, in the gentle slope of her nose –and her cheeks the claret flecked hues of seductive youth, her eyes caught mine with the sadness of centuries, and I dropped impulsively to my knees, as though stripped of every vestige of strength I had ever before possessed. There were unimaginable epochs in her eyes – although she could not have been more than ten years my senior – which ached as though she had lived forever, as though she herself were the very eternity I had sought, as though every blink recited the secrets of some hitherto unread holy book, some new and final truth, the only truth as would ever be my guide. What clavicles!, I thought unusually, as if in hypnosis to the rise and fall of her breathing chest, what LIFE! The shape, the shades, the dimension of her external genitalia concealed beneath her stolid undergarments (through whose cream hues lay, I could see, the perfect geometry of a vast pubic thatch, its sheer scale suggestive of brilliance, of import, of the most physical of beauties born of intellectual conceit) was irrelevant – it was her depths I sought and not their extraneous worldly gateways! – and as I hunched near-prostrate on the floor at her feet she made no move to display or exemplify the curiosities sheathed within, as the previous two beauties had in the manner of their own desperately powerful allure. She bared no breast, traced no thigh, opened no labia, suggested no anus, made no visible move to any concrete seduction, and yet there I knelt. I reached out one hand towards this holy ikon, cried out as I did so, and felt madam’s cold fingers raise me back to my feet like a slap to the face of my terrifying ecstatic bliss. She clapped briskly and hurried the four other girls from the room.

“His choice is made,” she said, caressing one of my cheeks with what I consider now an inappropriate air of maternal consideration. “You may use this room,” she said, to the lady, whose face betrayed no emotion save a staunch professionalism as she immediately began disrobing, untying her basque with her back to me. The faultless energies of my merciful cock left it still rigid. Madam blew out several candles as she made her exit from the room, leaving the dense smell of tallow (such old fashioned candles were still much favoured amongst the bordellos of this fine city, resultant of the sheer number of abattoir proprietors and master butchers – a bawdy bunch, the whiff of extinguished mammalian life still fresh on their rough-cut hands and the virility to match – who would commonly frequent the physical wonders of the Gropekuntelane, and conduct their after-hours businesses accordingly, their usual terms of credit often rendered uncharacteristically generous when caught at the point of orgasmic release, and at which juncture such prudent madam’s would prime their workers to extract from ‘neath a pillow or quilt some pre-drawn contract outlining the supply of any such required article, ensigned at the critical moment by the thrusting of a pen into the clasped tradesman’s hand to ensure his compliant concurrence in point of such munificent supply) somewhat appropriately in the air. She whispered into the ear of her lady but I could not hear the verbal intricacies of their conversation, the smiled to my person as she exited with best wishes and proclamations of luck and sensitivity to the two of us concurrently. I uttered the word ‘mother’, powerless against the force of my own constructed symbolism, and watched as her buttocks cooled in the air of the room, watched the shadows of her vaginal entrance at the cusp of their union, watched – weak of knee and claret of member – as she turned to face me, the majesty of her body unfolding like flowers woken by the rain. Like a farmer at market she silently paraded her wares for my approval and I felt tears pouring from my eyes as my shirt fell – something so unremittingly superfluous in the incredible world – into her hands. I clasped my arms around her with every convulsive boyish sob, boyish as the infant I was thrust suddenly and unprepared into the divine on earth, blinded by the holy light ignited by the passions of the flesh, made man from child by the odours of the cunt, by the precise tessellation of the genital segments. O! how the scales did fall away from my hitherto sightless eyes!, like some Paul of Tarsus in the city of Damascus , the truth of nature swam across me as wave upon wave of experience and revelation, as though only now, with the smell of her body so close to my own, had I finally awoken from the stultifying sleep of normalcy. It was as though clarity had finally descended, every edge and colour now shone as it should, every feeling magnified by the perilous beautiful gravity of my accidental life, every breath a primordial hurricane ‘twixt my very bronchioles! In hysterics I leant to kiss her, a gesture she refuted gently, and she hastened a-straddle, humanity itself become liquefied and of honey and poured forth warm and audible from the folds of her vagina, about myself, and with finely tuned musculature and considerate motion I was submerged, and not only in the physicality of her sex but in her most ethereal – spoken in simplistic terms – soul.

Despite a lifetime of endeavour I remain to this day powerless, unable to verbalise the sheer majesty of the sensations associated with that most urgent of couplings, my first of its kind, my second birth. Like all experience divine or godly it remains essentially ineffable, at odds with the logical limits that language might proffer. O how better expressed in sound, colour, shape, memory, prophesy are the holy ways of INTERCOURSE! Borne of man, language remains ill-equipped to deal with those things that transcend him! How it vulgarizes the movement of our parts, the accommodating cunt, opening its depths in invitation, in consent – and who could resist, man or woman, an entry so vital, so real; the transformative cock, insistent, somehow final. Those perfect constructs – no word can hope to offer them life greater than the life that blooms inside them, the raw existence! And yet as wordless as the experience is destined to remain, the effect it had upon me was as deafening to the senses as a great scream from the very spire of our mighty cathedral, and it resonates even now.

It goes without the crudity of explicitness to say that my technique – if one could call the virginal expulsions of an aching scrotum any such thing – was poor, primal if not inconsequential, product of some essential need – to be buried alive within in the musky glow of the cuntal form – and with no care for consideration or tenderness, for anything but the most involuntary thrusting gestures made loin to loin; but amidst this inexperience lay something all the more significant. I had been changed, altered, reconstructed; a boy I might still have been but my life had taken meaning, for the first time in those twelve idyllic years it had become mine – in some way I had joined with the world, and its past became my past, and mine its, for one must never underestimate the power of sexuality. Inside that first vagina I submitted myself to that power, pledged my lifelong allegiance to it. Perhaps then I was yet to realise the extent of its impact, the indents of the vagina forever burnt into the heart of my expectation, my dreams, but I felt baptised, awash in the musky nectar of a font so human it could only be anything BUT! And so with pubis bruised from the strength of my epiphany I watched as she rose from the floor where as beasts in the field we had married our genitals in this transient celestial merger, watched her flannel herself with one long blink as the moistened fibres stroked the length of her vulva, watched the two red pressure circles that had formed on the back of her thighs, watched her breasts that now seemed so vital to the world, this world, I watched this open flower slowly close under the darkness of normalcy, knew then with certainty that the flower should ne’er need to retract its petals, that there was no end to heaven, that every valued moment of life and death grew from this essential beauty, did pivot around it, and that LIFE should unfurl in flagrante delicto, and I watched her dressing in the flickering tallow light with the smell of her past and future like an animal scent across my retreating cock – how wilfully spent! – and laughed as a madman inside, laughed, laughed.

the tenancy agreement: epilogue

2010-09-25T17:25:00.004+01:00

Please imagine a house of brick and memories, of the psychic remnants of the long dead past. Of red brick and glass, symmetry, and the imprinted narratives of its generations. A house made organic by the centuries of blood from which its foundations were cut, in a street given consciousness by the weight of history, by the ancient tides of the forgotten Quaggy, the Ravensbourne – waters defaced by the flexing of the Thames wet muscle, abandoned, anonymous, (mere) tributary, never RIVER!

The swimming pool, filled in, became the grave they had imagined. A grave for six dead boys, marked with a circle of six grey stones. The freshly patted soil all scattered with grass seed, silently pecked at by the troupes of birds that line the streets in the dusk. It would grow patchy at first but thick with time, hair over a scar, the injury itself relegated to stories and anecdotes. The stones would soon wash away in the rain like a forgotten conversation. The truth is too frail to stand – fiction spreads through it like cancer, forming something truer still in its misremembered quotes, accidental embellishments, considered adaption’s, daydreamed happenings. Fiction makes new truth, thinks it into happening, a thousand different histories all authentic, all correct. And the six now amidst the layers of death that make a city, assimilated into London structure for the rest of time. They become it. It’s how cities are made. The concrete, steel and bricks are flourishes adorning a surface. The city as a concept grows of liquefying tissues, starved neuronal exchanges, voiceless apologies, unlived futures, unrecorded memories. Lucas and Tanya hold hands like lovers or children and watch the To Let sign hammered into the gravel in the front garden. As it was, as it always will be. Death always happens. It’s nothing, however much we might want it to be everything. Nothing changed. There are a thousand ways it could have happened but the end would always be the same. From the end comes the beginning. The To Let sign falters in the wind which blows the workman’s sparse fringe from his brow. And in that gentle movement, and in Lucas’s warm smile, and in the pools of Tanya’s eyes, it’s so perfectly clear. This is the end. The To Let sign, faltering in the wind which blows the workman’s sparse fringe from his brow.

Please imagine everything.

the tenancy agreement: chapter 14

2010-09-17T19:04:00.003+01:00

2005

November

Tanya was still in the armchair. The others all back in their seats. Semi-circular silence. She’d wiped some of the blood from her face onto a tea towel which she’d left on the floor next to her. The tea towel had a faint smell of week old lager. There was still a red sheen on her face like the remnants of artificial dyes from cheap face paints. She seemed to have calmed down. Breathing settled and staring straight ahead. She’d speak when she was ready. It was one hell of a trauma. They’d turned the overhead light on. The gravity of the situation seemed to demand it. Made the room feel like a waiting room on the platform of a train station, tiled floor and metal benches set behind thick painted wooden doors punctuated with reinforced glass windows. Tense. Hostile. Waiting for something to happen. Greg looked at his phone, then at the others. Pleading eyes. Couldn’t phone the police. Couldn’t have the police sniffing round. But then look at her. So ask her to leave or what? Get her to phone her family? What, like Lucas? Where was her dead brother? They had to get her out. It wasn’t their responsibility. She wasn’t. But fucking look at her.

“Do you think Joe’s okay?” said Greg. How long had it been? Half an hour? Twenty minutes? Less than that. What did he think he was going to do round there? “I thought he’d be back by now.”

Ezra looked at his phone. He looked worried. Craned his head back towards the window but the curtains were shut. Wouldn’t have seen anything.

“I’m sure he’s fine,” he said. Voice quiet with the weakness of disbelief. Looked at the phone again. “I’m sure he is.” Any semblance of certainty shafted by self-serving repetition.

“He’s probably forgotten what he went for,” said Tom. Sat forward in his seat. Hands on his knees. “You know Joe.”

“He’ll be back in a bit,” said Jonathan.

Speculation pierced by Tanya laughing loudly. Haw haw haw, a startling burst. They all four turned to look at her, Ezra’s mouth even slightly open. The damned social inappropriateness of it, the laughter. And in an anxious room. And fuck, the volume of it. She turned her head slightly to look at them, saw their expressions. Laughter stopped as quickly as it had started, and she sat calm once again.

“He’s dead.” She said it levelly, matter-of-fact. An observation of unquestionable, empirically verifiable certainty. A consensually accepted truism.

Ezra caught all of their eyes. This was getting wrong.

“What?” said Greg.

Tanya laughed again. Another machine gun burst, erratic, loud. Erupted uncontrolled from her swollen cut lips. Like the offset of psychosis or a terrible illness. She sounded insane. Ezra knelt down next to her again, returned his damp palm to her knee.

“Tanya?” he said. “What did you just say?”

“He’s dead. Joe’s dead.”

“What do you mean? Talk to me.”

“I am talking. He’s dead.”

Ezra stood up. Rubbed his hand over his moustache, his beard. It made a rough sound.

“You mean your husband... is Joe going to be okay over there?” He pointed to the window. “Is your husband...”

“He’s dead,” she said. Not looking at Ezra when she spoke. Like her eyes were closed, even with the lids up.

“Tanya?” Greg pushed Ezra to one side, towered over her. “Tanya? Listen to me. Who the fuck’s dead?”

“Joe. Joe’s dead.” Their raised voices made hers even slower, more measured. Spoke like something from a dream.

“How do you know that?” said Greg.

She was still looking straight ahead, straight through them, through history and life. The cut on her chest had stopped bleeding. Greg thought of Lucas and of Tanya. That horrible surprise on his face when the typewriter came down. The darkness of her imagined genitals. Scarred arms marking the unbearable passage like crosses on a calendar. A whole lifetime. What inconceivable horror. Ticking off the days. My body is a timepiece. Vividly recording the reliability of my decay. Until finally YES! Reborn! Out of life and into death! Born into death! Empty endless irresponsible death! The first and last consensual act of life is death. Thrust screaming uncertain into the world we leave it with the certainty of what we will face. Nothing.

“Did you think you’d get away with it?” she said. Eyes fixed.

Greg and Ezra looked at each other. Ezra’s face dropped. Paled behind the red-tinged beard. Mouth went slack.

“With what?” said Greg. “Tanya?”

“With what you’ve done.”

“We don’t know what...”

“He’s dead.”

“Shit,” said Tom. Something made him back up towards the wall. Spine pressed against the wooden edge of the mantelpiece.

“There’s evil through life,” she said. She rocked just gently. Her face made tiny twitches. Involuntary electrical impulses. Eyes bloodshot and teary. Blinked slowly. Isolated tears fell weighted down her blood smeared cheeks. “Everywhere you look. Even houses. In the bricks they’re made of. In the way they’re built. Just terrible doom.”

“Oh shit,” said Tom again.

“Shut her up,” said Jonathan.

“It spills into the people,” she said. Her lip was quivering as she spoke and there were many tears but she was composed like she hadn’t noticed.

“This isn’t good,” said Tom.

“Shut up,” said Greg.

And Tanya thought back. Her mother sitting immobile clutching the arms of the chair. Screaming a wretched deafening scream. Eyes and mouth stretched wide with the effort. Just screaming.

“Lucas and I,” said Tanya. “We lived here.”

And her mother was slapping herself across the face, scratching it, thin skin splitting, tearing chunks of hair loose from the scalp. From her screams came words, chanted over and over with a hoarse grotesque voice. Such blood from the scratches. Words formed like a gestating ancient language. A guttural response to stimuli and sculpted into meaning. Grunted out without breath. “DREAMLOVERDREAMLOVERDREAMLOVERDREAMLOVERDREAMLOVER”. The aching refrain of the dead Bobby Darin’s literally broken heart. The soundtrack of a collapsing mind. This yelped psychosis.

Ezra and Greg had edged away from Tanya and Tom was pacing on the other side of the room, hands clasped tight together. Jonathan had sat back down, too afraid to stand. No Joe. No Conor.

“What the hell is she doing?” said Tom.

“I’ll handle this,” said Ezra, holding his hand up. “Tanya? Everything’s going to be okay. You’ve had a terrible shock tonight.”

“Shock?” said Tom. “She knows. She fucking knows.”

“No, Tom, she’s had a shock. That’s all.” Look at that look. Fucking firm look. Her eyes still trained straight ahead. All of time in an instant.

“I know,” she said.

“Tanya,” said Greg softly. He leaned into her with delusions of comfort. Real fast she drew a knife up and dragged it hard across Greg’s forearm. He screamed when the blade pierced into the flesh. Watched it part like the smile of a sliced melon. Greg swung himself away from the knife, clutching his arm and pushing the flesh closed, and Ezra reared backwards with him. “Jesus,” said Greg.

“Shit stop it,” said Ezra. Stumbled on the edge of the blanket they’d laid over the bloodstain.

Tanya stood up from the chair, knife held out in front of her. Slashing it towards them. Grinning dumbly at their cowardice.

“Fucking bitch stabbed me,” said Greg.

“Not useful,” said Ezra. Hands held up. An empty nod to truce.

“Fuck you,” said Greg. Arm pissing blood straight through his clutched fingers.

“Fuck no one.” Ezra looked at Tom when said it.

“This is too much,” said Tom.

“Get her out of here,” said Jonathan.

“I know,” she said. Weirdly calm sounding given the circumstances.

“Shit,” said Tom.

She lunged at Greg and Ezra point first. Missed the stab and Greg impulsively punched her in the back of the head. Face glazed in sad surprise. Taut with confusion. She fell to her knees and he punched her again, in the face, fist arced wide in preparation. Tits hit the floor with the rest of her. Bloody spit in the corner of her lips. She was loosely conscious. Again Greg pushed the two halves of the wound together.

“That’ll do for Christ’s sake,” said Ezra. “We don’t want to kill her too.”

“Now what?” said Tom.

Jonathan jerked his eye across the accumulated shit left all over the room. There was a piece of rope Joe had found somewhere, too good to leave. He threw it to Ezra.

“What do you want me to do with this?” he said.

“Tie her up,” said Jonathan.

“Great, hostage taking. And murder.”

“We’re the fucking hostages,” said Greg, trying to tie a sports sock around his arm. A Daz-rinsed tourniquet. A primark medical aid. Pulling the toe end with his teeth. “And stop going on about murder.”

“She knows anyway. She said she knows.”

“Maybe she was bluffing.”

“She wasn’t fucking bluffing,” said Ezra.

“Just tie her up,” said Jonathan. “It’ll buy us some time if nothing else.”

Greg and Ezra heaved her onto a wooden dining chair and tied her wrists together behind her back, then to the chair and to her ankles. Tom picked the knife off the floor and threw it behind the TV. Tanya blinked herself to awareness. Felt the rope on her wrists.

“Ropes?” she said. “This what you’re into Ezra? Gent in conversation, animal in the bedroom?”

Ezra folded his arms. “No,” he said. So proudly. Moral paragon etched onto his future headstone.

“Pity,” she said. Turned to Greg. “How about you? You like to see a woman bound? In your control? Doing exactly what you say? Is that the way you like it?”

He tried not to look at the shape her body made between her legs. The gaps and the declivities. The imaginable feel of her cunt in his mouth. Not a good time.

“Fuck you,” he said. “Beats getting stabbed.”

“Stabbed? That was a scratch. Your friend Joe – he knows what a stabbing is.”

Greg slapped her once in the face. Split her lip anew. Caught it on his ring. She looked surprised, ran the tip of her tongue over the blood. Smiled as she did it. Ezra pushed Greg back, eyes narrowed with admonitory mirth.

“Hit me again Greg,” she said. “Be a man. What about you Tom? Jonathan? I bet you two want to touch me. If you could stop touching each other.”

“What the fuck have you done to Joe?” Greg shouted the question like a punk lyric.

“I haven’t done anything,” she said. “I’ve been here with you.”

“Tanya,” said Ezra. “I know you’re angry, and you may have a right to be, but just tell us where Joe is.”

“Angry? Why would I be angry? Because you killed my brother?”

“Where’s Joe?” He spat by mistake. He had started crying but he didn’t seem upset.

“I told you already.”

“Where?”

“He’s dead,” she said. Newsreader cool.

“You fucking...” Greg had balled his fist and drew it back but Ezra restrained him, both hands flat on his chest.

“Take it easy Greg,” he said.

“Take it easy? She said Joe’s dead.”

“How would she know if he was? She’s been sitting right here.”

“Oh he is dead,” she said. “Lucas did it.”

They all stopped in their tracks. Like the world just ended. Somehow it felt inevitable. No fresh starts. No clean breaks. Everything will always fuck you in the end.

“Lucas?” said Tom. Cleared his throat. Mocked by breathlessness. Buried alive inside these cheap painted walls. Upturned ashtrays his eternal pillow. Death shroud denim. He felt his lip moving of its own accord. Animated by the strain. Then both of them. Whipped his mouth up sharp into a grimace and pinched his face up. Did it when he cried too. Quivering bottom set against sneering top. Nerve damage smile.

“You remember Lucas?” she said. “Cripple? Landlord? My brother?”

“Of course. It’s just...”

“Yes?”

“Isn’t Lucas...” It was Greg. Both fists still clenched. Blue eyes soaked in urgent life.

“Is he?” said Tanya.

The dull light of the upright lamp flickered off then straight back on.

“This might be bad,” said Jonathan.

“You could say that, yeah,” said Ezra. Choking years of friendship with mouthfuls of disdain. “One house and two friends missing, presumed fucked. I’d say that’s pretty bad, yes. Shit, even.”

Tanya was giggling. With all the disembodied emptiness of canned laughter. Disconnected from actual.

“I just...” said Tom.

“What?” said Ezra. Snapped out, the cunt.

“I don’t understand why.”

Tanya giggling.

“Oh please. You know what’s happening here as well as she does. We all know. We were all there, weren’t we? We all did it, didn’t we?”

“Fuck, Ezra, he was dead,” said Greg. Blood curdling out of the sock’s fibrous parameters. A shapeless bargain cum spectator to the dying present. “It was a mistake, a terrible mistake, but the man was fucking dead.”

“We. Killed. Him. Do you get that? We killed him.”

The lamp flickered again and left shadows imprinted in instant memory like flash photography. Flickered like it was going to blow out. Tom was gulping in short breaths. He looked at the ceiling in a panic. Tanya was beaming, head angled up to the ceiling too. The other three looked up. Fucking cardboard pillar, a shitty totem.

“What was that,” said Tom. Hissed.

“What?” Greg and Jonathan said it in unison, like simultaneous prayer.

There was creaking from upstairs. The sound of floorboards being walked over. It moved across the whole length of Greg’s bedroom. Definitely footsteps. Even made the lightshade move. They followed the sound with their eyes. Something was up there. Took a few steps then stopped. Then it started again, louder, heavier, like it was fucking running about, just back and forth, one end of the room to the other. Running and stamping its feet.

“No one else is here right?” said Greg.

“Fuck, like who?” said Ezra. More aggressive the more frightened he got.

“Conor?” said Jonathan. Hopeful. Stupid.

Ezra was looking at the ceiling. “I don’t think Conor’s coming back tonight,” he said.

More creaking. Even louder. Fucking sounded like running, to the bedroom door. Heard the whine of hinges. Tom, Greg and Ezra all crept towards the hallway. Crushed by the silence they could hear their own sweat fall. So quiet. Except the creaking floorboards. The door opening. And thumping, getting faster.

“Shit what is that?” said Tom.

Ezra and Greg told him to shut up. Thumping. Things don’t just thump. Fucking hammering.

“Oh fuck,” he said.

“Oh god please be quiet,” said Greg, straining to hear, to find sense in the noise. No one sure who he was talking to.

They were peering out of the door, into the dark hall, bulb long smashed in the drunken revelry they tried never to regret. A light flicked on in one the bedrooms upstairs. They saw the glare grow out of the dark. Still creaking. Still thumping.

“Oh shit guys,” said Tom.

Greg looked back into the corner of the living room where Jonathan was standing. Saw Lucas behind him. Bloody and fucked up. Gnarled and bent in the wheelchair like a tree felled in thunder. Caught a glimpse of him out the corner of his eye. Flashed there like a camera bulb. Like a floater. A zombie speck dashed momentarily in reluctant visual parameters. Grin spread over Lucas’s shit face. A split second thing. Anomalous peripheral vision. Dead Lucas.

“Jesus!” said Greg. He fell backward onto Tom and Ezra. “Get the fuck out of there.”

Jonathan span around to look behind him. Lucas there, Lucas gone. Greg couldn’t take his eyes from the corner. He was panting, fingers clutched to the paint of the door frame. Knew he’d seen it but the corner left empty. Death hung in the room like weird incense. Jonathan too shit scared to move again. Greg mumbling: you see it? It was still dark in the hallway except for the faint light from the upstairs bedroom. Something was wrong. Something else. Jonathan’s eyes jerked to Tanya. Gave him the movement his body wouldn’t. Then to Ezra. Looked to his side.

“Where’s Tom?” he said. “Tom?”

He wasn’t there. Had been right at Ezra’s side but then – right then – he wasn’t there. The thumping from upstairs got faster. Louder. Frantic thumping it swelled under the weight of Tom’s absence.

“Come on,” said Greg, turning to the stairs. He flicked the light switch. Didn’t come on. The predictability would have felt like parody if he hadn’t been so terrified. Ezra was still in the doorway, framed by the viscous light of the living room.

“Keep an eye on her,” he said. To Jonathan.

“She’s not getting up.”

“Just keep an eye on her. Better to be sure.”

“You want me to stay here on my own?” said Jonathan. Red rimmed brown eyes built up to shameless tears. Something about blue jeans made him feel vulnerable.

“Yes. Just for a minute.”

“God.” Tanya was staring at him.

Greg was craning his neck, trying to look up the stairs without going up them. Still the thumping. Fucking neighbours didn’t complain about that.

“Didn’t I ask you to change this fucking light bulb?” he said.

“Where’s Tom?”

“Shut up. I don’t know.”

“Christ,” said Jonathan in the living room. “Where the fuck is he?”

“I want you to shut up,” said Greg. Had to almost shout it over the noise. Trying to peer up. Then a scream. Wretched, hollow, torn out. Terrible. A dying scream. Knew it was Tom before it had even finished. The thumping stopped. The bedroom light flicked off. Greg felt the darkness smother him like cold water.

“Come on,” said Greg. Started climbing the stairs.

“Greg I’m not sure how sensible this is,” said Ezra.

“Fuck sensible. None of this is sensible.”

He was climbing up slowly, one step at a time. Silent sweating. Ezra squirming in discomfort, lingering at the bottom.

“Greg. Come back down here. Maybe it’s better to think about this. Down here.”

“We’ve got to find Tom you bastard. Get up these stairs.”

“I’m not sure this is a good idea.”

“Shit.” Shouted.

“What? What is it?” Nothing. “Greg? Fuck. Greg?”

Upstairs it fell silent. Except creaking floorboards. They started again in the front bedroom. In Greg’s room. Couldn’t be Greg. Greg was still on the stairs. But it was creaking. Louder. It was fucking footsteps. It must have been. He could hear them.

“Greg?” said Ezra. Traces of panic, like echoes, memories. Still at the bottom, in the hallway. “What the fuck’s going on up there? Greg?” Cocked his ear up but couldn’t hear shit. Just that creaking. “Greg?”

Greg was awkwardly spread on the carpet at the top of the stairs. Tripped over a pile of socks. In his head he blamed Joe as he fell. He picked himself up. Four doors branched off of the landing, all then in darkness, four doors closed. Fuck, he said, to himself. He could hear Ezra calling him, but could hear the creaking floorboards over the top of that. The thumping started again. Quiet first but quickly louder. And a weird kind of slapping sound. Like slapping a wet thigh. Primed buttocks. Leather hand run down the length of dead livestock. Now he was up there it wasn’t clear where it was coming from. Sounded like everywhere. He reached for the handle of the door on the left. Back bedroom. Tom’s. Grown of dead foetus memory, incest, latterly the darkened blow jobs of tender faces, attentively done. And fucking. Thanking each other at the end of it. Greg pushed the door open, turned the light on, peered in. it was empty. He left the light on and walked across the landing to the other back bedroom, opened the door, turned the light on. Empty. Behind him music started abruptly, thrust into life like an alarm clock, blaring out of the room he had just left. It was The Birthday Party. Loud as fuck. Greg rushed back to the room, found the cheap paper lightshade swinging from side to side, as if it had been pushed. Dark rhythmically swallowed the corners of the room with the arc of the swinging light. Left changeable shadows. Made his brain work oddly, disorientated. He grabbed the bulb, screamed at his own burnt fingers. Screamed again at Ezra filling the door. Could see he was speaking but couldn’t hear him over the feedback, just fish lips impatiently chewing the words out. Greg turned the music off.

“What did you find?” said Ezra.

“Nothing.” Greg snapped it. “I was looking but you came up here and scared the shit out of me.”

Ezra’s eyes, pointed over Greg’s shoulder, widened. He instinctively took two steps backwards. Screeched it out: “Greg!”

Greg turned around and Lucas was behind him. Slowly, jerkily standing up from the wheelchair, like a rehabilitated veteran. The chair creaked like dead metal in the crushing silence. Greg’s voice lost to his own fear. Lucas was grinning. One of his eyes almost rotted away. The smile tore his bottom lip off and it hung loosely to his face. The skin sagged off of him like strangers clothes. Digesting itself. He straightened his weak legs. Something horrific about his unfamiliar movements. Ezra watched, paralysed. The irony. Paralysed by a cripples motion. Greg coughed out a scream. Lucas plunged his gloved hand into Greg’s open mouth, clutched onto his tongue, thick slimy muscle he clasped in the ruptured palm of his glove, and started to pull. Greg’s eyes stretched wide he watched it, felt the tongue pulled, saw Lucas’s yellow tinged skin dripping like wax around the cuff of his glove, heard the buckled bones of his legs and spine snapping back into life, tried to scream around the glove, felt his tongue splitting, tearing somewhere awful, felt the rush of blood, rich and meaty, felt it pouring down his throat. Ezra staggered backwards, staggered away. Lucas was silent. No, he was groaning. No, he was laughing. He placed his other hand on Greg’s forehead and gave a certain yank. Pulled the tongue free. A fountain of blood erupted from Greg’s mouth. Ezra could hear him choking on it. Odd how it sounded so full of life. Lucas held the muscle in his hand. It shone like a red trophy. Ezra backed further away. On desperate hands and knees Greg crawled, half sobbing, blood pouring from his mouth, spewing from the severed tongue stump, reached one hand out to Ezra, tried to speak, to plead. Ezra looked at him, at the blood, at Lucas, and he didn’t move. In a flash Lucas leapt onto Greg and pulled him back into the bedroom. He drove his fingers into Greg’s eyes sockets. The globes burst in aqueous humor and vitreous body, jelly liquid mixed with blood and dripping like aspic down Lucas’s probing thumbs. Greg was honking a kind of scream, mustered it from his vocal chords, and Lucas pulled him further into the room by the ankles, then sunk his teeth in Greg’s varying body parts. The fleshy underarm. The throat. Ezra’s face contorted, horrified, and he backed right away, felt the banister on his buttocks before he fell over the top of it, down onto the stairs below, down into the hallway. The bedroom door slammed shut.

Cut forehead but Ezra got straight to his feet. A scratch really. Nearly leapt into the living room.

“Jonathan,” he said oblivious. “We better get out.” Jonathan wasn’t there. Empty corner. Ezra turned in a panic to where Tanya had been sitting. Gone. Rope left in a coiled pile on the floor. chair upturned, her blood printed onto the cheap upholstery in thick neat lines. Ezra crept deeper in and saw Jonathan on the floor, edged behind the TV, like he’d tried to get away. His throat was slit and his stomach carved open, intestines tugged out and spread like display sausages across the window of his torso, onto the carpet around him. Yards of the shit. Ezra screamed and puked. Force of the regurgitation felt oddly relieving. He let it keep coming, retching and retching, gasping his empty gut back out and clutching onto the mantelpiece for support. The creaking and thumping was deafening. Felt like the ceiling’d cave in, the cornices crack like the opening earth to swallow him, blood pouring from the wounded house, the architecture humanised by generations of violence. The lamp flickered on and off. Jonathan dead on the floor. Ezra grabbed at his temples with both hands, trying to squeeze the noise away, then ran out of the house.

Head spinning in the street. There was a light on in the neighbour’s house. What was he supposed to say? He asked himself the question and hammered on their door. Still clutching his head with the other hand. Drown out even the memory. Blood was pooled on his eyebrows from the cut on his forehead. Clothes soaked in the juices of too many people. He was stepping from one foot to the other. Tony opened the door. Warmth, light and soft jazz hit Ezra like a backhand, muffled conversation somewhere in the house. Tony’s mouth dropped, split his face like an unmanned ventriloquist’s dummy.

“Ezra? What in God’s name?”

“Please,” said Ezra. Grabbing both his shoulders with bloody digits. “I need help.”

“What’s happened?” Looking at the blood on his face. His clothes. “Are you hurt?”

“Please. Please let me in.”

“Ezra, we’ve got company. It’s very late.”

“I’m sorry, but I’m in so much trouble.” Balls taut with panic. Blue eyes wide. “Please help me.”

“I can see that Ezra.” Soothing Tony. Man knew how to manage. Practised reassurance. “But this is no time to...”

“Please, I need to come in.”

Ezra pushed past Tony and into the house, straight into the living room. Helplessly drawn to the life of voices, toasting glasses. The mundane sounds of domestic normality. The smell of finished meals. The beating heart of a kind of existence. Barely looked up when he spoke.

“I’m sorry to barge in like this but...”

“Hello Ezra.”

That voice. Ezra stopped in his tracks like he had ceased to be. Dropped to his knees. Smirking legs betrayed him. Lifted his eyes to see it.

Lucas. Lucas in the wheelchair. Not bloody. Not beaten. Not rotting. Not fucked up. Not congealing, decaying, hideous Lucas. Just Lucas. Washed blonde hair spiked in the right gentle places. Tanned face handsome, white tooth smile. Eyes shone in candlelight, in halogen ceiling spotlights. Gloves meticulous. Clothes even more so. It was him alright. Untouched. Glowing with a life Ezra had never seen. Tanya sat next to him. Simple evening dress. No wounds, no blood, no genitals or screaming. She did look beautiful. Soft. They held hands, her index finger folded caressing into his palm. Ezra felt himself crying. Wondered how wet tears could burn his face. When he rolled his eyes upwards he saw a fringe of blood.

“Lucas,” he said. He spluttered. “You’re dead. We...”

They all laughed. Lucas. Tanya. Tony. His wife. Laughed until it was oppressive. Laughed even further. Ezra struggled to his feet, knocked into the coffee table. Red wine spilt. Bottle and two glasses soaking into thick beige shag. Where’s the salt when you need it? Laughter doubled, swelling all the more. Pulsed around him like a growing tumour. The sound given physical properties by its own recurrence. Became a thing itself. Swallowing him in the force of its own audibility. He staggered blindly out of the door, across the hall, into the dining room. Had to blink to get some focus back, and there they were. Five friends gone corpse, propped sitting up around the table like an uncomfortable dinner party. Conor: face lifted off like a manhole and raw muscle where it used to be, but unmistakably him, greying hairs even blood couldn’t hide. Joe: throat hacked open and bled like a pig. Tom: head bludgeoned in and left half the size, skull shattered to sharp thick fragments reminiscent of ancient pottery archaeologically unearthed, a complex jigsaw rich in brain, the whole thing sunk in like a popped balloon. Jonathan: guts left out like worms in the rain, like a carnivorous gastronomic delicacy left to prime, throat so slit the head only just stayed on. Greg: jaw broken two fists wide, mandible hung flapping, hell-red mouth an ancient blood pool, gooey pits where eyes once blinked, chunks of flesh torn toothily from the whole. Each had a glass of wine in front of them, white for Conor – such attention to detail! – and red the rest. Conical party hats in yellow, blue and green had been strapped with elastic to their heads. Tom’s sat uneven, slumping into the crushed remnants of his sagging parietal, the scalp like a loose sheet of turf scuffed up at the corners but draped temporarily over the jagged bone. Ezra screamed again, screamed until his nostrils stung. Backed out of the door and into Tony. He pulled him into the living room. What jolly expressions on their faces! Tony stripped Ezra’s dress off, tore it down the middle, and swept everything off of the coffee table with a stroke of his arm, glasses and Guardian newspapers and TV remotes. He slammed Ezra’s long weak body onto its surface – wood buckling under the impact, splinters in the flesh – and tied his hands up underneath it, table edges cutting into armpits, again into biceps. Lucas and Tanya both applauded. Rapt faces: the pride; the humour; the stimulation.

“Please,” said Ezra. “Please don’t. I’ll do anything.”

“It’s okay, Ezra,” said Lucas gently.

“Lucas?” said Tony. He was circling the table, his eyes fixed on Ezra. “May I?” Lucas nodded. Tony clapped his hands together, crooked smile drawn over his face. He walked heavily out of the room – there wasn’t the space to run past the antique furniture – but was almost straight back in, carrying a large toolbox and a couple of plastic sheets. Ezra was gasping, trying to catch his failed breath, sobbing. Tony laid the plastic around the edges of the table. The toolbox had a yellow handle.

“Oh God. Please don’t kill me.” Somehow Ezra got the words out. He thought he was going to be sick. He could barely turn his head. Lucas and Tanya were at the wrong end of the table for him to see. Tony’s wife had hitched her skirt up to her waist and had one leg over the arm of the sofa, and had her middle and index fingers in a V around her clitoris. She sunk them into her cunt every time Ezra begged, closed her eyes to really listen with every sob he honked out. “I beg you,” he said. He was still crying.

Tony lifted the catches of his toolbox and took out a thin hacksaw. The tools were meticulously organised. He ran his finger across the blade and nodded approvingly. It had cut into his finger a little. He hoisted up Ezra’s left leg and started to saw into the back of his knee in long even strokes. The ligaments snapped like wet tea towels. Ezra was screaming so loudly. Tony hacked on, arm trembling slightly with the effort, flecks of spatter and skin airbrushed over the tabletop and the sheets of plastic in a wealth of red tones. Lucas turned up anonymous saxophone music to drown out the noise. Tony stopped sawing and dabbed at his brow with the back of his hand, then put the hacksaw down carefully onto the plastic sheet. He knelt down by the toolbox and examined the contents. Settled on the claw hammer. It felt right in his hands, the weight, the arc, the angle, like it was made for him. He looked at Lucas and smiled cheerfully, even thankfully. Lucas was beaming too. A beautiful modern friendship. Tony gently tapped Ezra with the hammer as though he were testing his reflexes, five or six times, each in different places – kneecap, shoulder, fingers, forehead. Weighing up the resistance and the potential.

“Open your eyes please Ezra,” he said, softly drawing the claw end down the length of Ezra’s cheeks. Ezra’s chin was shuddering without control. “Open your eyes.”

“I’d do as he says Ezra,” said Lucas.

“Open your eyes,” said Tony again.

Ezra tried to pry them open. In instinct they had clasped tight shut like molluscs. He couldn’t see properly because his eyes were so teary, his vision drowned beneath their water. His whole body was shaking. Tony held the hammer just above Ezra’s mouth, tapped very gently on his teeth. Ezra could feel the metal on his lips. The weight of it on his teeth was nauseating. He puked a small amount, odd specks foamed out of his mouth and onto the hammer, the rest he swallowed back down. The hydrochloric acid burnt against his throat, fucked over by his own stupid body. Lucas was rubbing his gloved hand up and down Tanya’s leg, inside her thigh, left it lingering around the surface of her cunt.

“Please,” Ezra said. The speech erupted in fits and starts. It sounded involuntary, his body’s last ditch response to stimuli. Snot was pooling out of his flared nostrils. “Lucas. Please.”

“Don’t ask me, Ezra,” said Lucas. Fingers submerged in his sisters genitals. Tony’s wife working her own.

“We had a deal,” said Ezra. His sobs sounded ancient. The hammer was so close to Ezra’s mouth that it was distorting his words.

“No Ezra. No deal.”

Tony’s muscles were primed for death. The hammer caught the lamp light. The hammer came down.

the tenancy agreement: chapter 13

2010-09-13T12:08:00.004+01:00

2005

November

Back in their seats Greg and Jonathan both lit cigarettes. Comforting routine of slow death unaccelerated by violence or accident. Tom had his head hung, probing nicotine fingers into his eyes. Rich yellow penetrating fingers. Called them his Shane McGowan’s. Scrubbed them raw with wire wool and washing up liquid every couple of months over the kitchen sink to etch the yellow off. Like varnish off a sideboard. Restoring his own antique – twenty four year vintage! – appendages. Left the skin feeling thin and tender but alive. Not deadened by the weight of casual addiction. Ezra strode the room. His long legs made it feel tiny, structurally vulnerable to his every move.

“So let’s think about this smartly,” he said. “Where could the body be?” He pointed, gestured when he spoke. Product of his notably amateur dramatic training. His nightmare of inexpressive self.

“I guess...” said Jonathan through smoke.

“Yes?”

“I don’t know.”

“Right.”

Ezra looked to Greg, hoping for reason.

“I honestly don’t know Ezra,” he said. “If he was dead...”

“He was dead.” Ezra leaned in about twelve inches from Greg’s face when he said it. Slapped the back of his right hand hard down into the palm of his left. There were these faint strands of spittle stuck between his lips when he opened his mouth wide to speak, which he often had when he was excited.

“Well if he was dead he should still be there,” said Greg.

“Exactly, and he’s not. So let’s think about the evidence. If he wasn’t dead, hypothetically” –

“I thought you said he was dead,” said Joe. Running his finger around the saucy bottom rim of an eaten Pot Noodle. Chunklets of freeze dried soya texture congealed in cooled stock powder still granular from poor mixing. He fingered one out of the plastic and into his mouth.

“He was. Is. Hypothetically I said. If he wasn’t dead, which he was, but if he wasn’t, hypothetically, if he had by some fucking miracle regained consciousness, despite the smashed head and slit throat, where would he be?” They all just looked at him. Stood there in the middle of the room with eyes kind of manic like he’d been awake too long. Rosy wet pools shot through with fine veins. He shrugged. “In the basement,” he said, like he’d told them their own birthdays. “Even if we hadn’t killed the bastard, if he was still alive, and it’s a fucking big if, he would still be in that basement. He was wrapped in a rug; he couldn’t have just walked out of there. And if he had there’d be a trail of blood from there to fucking there. Can we agree on that?”

“I suppose so,” said Tom, tired with it. What terrible moments in life ruin everything in an instant. He had to go to lectures.

“Good,” Ezra went on. “So if he was alive, which is completely impossible, he would have been too weak and too confined to get out of here without us noticing. So he’d still be in the basement, right?”

“Okay,” said Greg.

“Okay. So then the second possibility is that he is dead. We killed him.” He looked at their four faces. Killing already sounded so tasteless. Lucas’s death was an occurrence already assimilated into their lives, divorced from the visceral emotion and morality that the word implied. A passive unfolding, a routine happenstance. He sounded impatient when he spoke again. “Fuck, he is dead, we did kill him. And so I’m not a fucking scientist but can a dead body move itself, with or without the presence of a rug?”

“Well, no,” said Tom, shifting in his seat to get his phone out of his pocket. Thought he felt his thigh vibrate.

“Yes, no,” said Ezra, “and there are no buts. A dead body cannot move. Lucas is dead, we left him in the basement and no one’s been in here except the six people who live here. Now could that body have upped and moved?”

“No but...”

“But the fuck what?”

“But it did.” Tom held onto his phone in the quiet. Greg flung a leg over the arm of the chair. Knocked an ashtray over. The grey stain embedded in the carpet from previous spills invited you to keep on doing it. They’d sweep up the butts but the stain never shifted. Along with the bloodstain it was like a birthmark, integral to the personality of the carpet.

“Look, that’s just it, no it didn’t. Bodies don’t move. There are six people living in this house and only five of them are here. Did any of you move it?” Everyone shook their head no. “Okay, and I didn’t move it.”

“Which leaves Conor,” said Jonathan.

“Progress,” said Ezra. “Where is Conor?”

“He’s not here,” said Greg. Not sharing Ezra’s certainty. Doesn’t add up. No one would have moved it on their own. They all had to deal with it. Responsibility.

Ezra snatched the phone out of Tom’s hands and started jabbing at the buttons with uncoordinated thrusts.

“Then let’s call him and sort this out,” he said, holding the phone up to his ear. “That’s the logical approach. Deduction. If something can’t move itself then it can only be moved. Acted upon. By something else. We didn’t touch it so that leaves Conor.” He had a smug look on his face. Certain and comfortable. “You know what Conor’s like. Gets things done. He’ll probably be coming through that door any minute, wondering what all the panic was about.”

A phone started ringing. Sounded like it was coming from the next room. Conor’s room. Ezra stormed out saying fuck.

“I don’t think Conor has anything to do with this,” said Tom, standing up and wringing his hands, looking at the floor. Interior monologue externalised. Happens in close-knit groups.

“Cunt’s right though,” said Greg. “A body doesn’t just disappear. Someone must have moved it.”

“That’s what worries me,” said Tom.

“Exactly. Was it one of us?” said Jonathan.

“There’s no other reasonable explanation,” said Greg.

“Shit this isn’t a very reasonable situation,” said Tom. “There’s nothing fucking reasonable going on here.”

Ezra stormed back into the room. The breeze from his body made the carrier bag of beer rustle. His cheeks were flushed red and he waved Conor’s phone in the air in front of him, threw Tom’s phone onto the table.

“Typical fucking Conor,” he said.

There was a knock on the door. Shit that fucking door. Greg lurched out of his seat instinctively. How easily door knocks had become the sound of the end. The ominous sound of failure. The rapping force of authority. Fucking raven. Fucking Poe. Gently rapping at my glass fronted door. Ringing through skulls like unanaesthetised dental work.

“Ha,” said Ezra, a proud snort, still clutching Conor’s phone. “Expect that’s him now. Probably forgot his fucking keys as well.”

Ezra walked out into the hall and pulled open the inside door and took a step into the porch. Cold tiled floor. He spoke as he opened the front door up.

“Where have you been Conor you bastard?” he said, door swinging inwards towards him. Eyeing the sight before him his smirk dropped like a cold cock. “Oh Jesus.”

It was Tanya.

Her nose was bleeding from both nostrils. Her face beaten up, cheeks and chin. Shallow cuts over her chest just above the weight of the tits. Half her clothes were torn off. And hung limp like history. There were patches of bruised flesh through the gaps in her clothing. He couldn’t help looking. Saw a line of blood in a path to her navel. Curve of her hips red-bruised in finger shapes. Old arm scars cut back open straight through the shitty tissue. Her bottom lip was shaking and she was sobbing drily on the doorstep. Ezra noticed how thirsty he was. Swallowed and reached towards her. Took her arm softly.

“Tanya. My god. What happened to you?” She didn’t respond. Just cried out nothing. Oh sweet nothing. Easier than even something. “Tanya? Who did this?”

She clutched onto him. Fucked face buried in his fibrous dress.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. Piercing, hysterical, ecstatic pain. Voiced so racked it felt distant like another world. Inconceivably shattering. “I’m so sorry I’m so sorry.”

“Jesus,” said Ezra, holding her head into him. “You’re okay now.”

“I’m sorry I’m so sorry.” Must have been the shock. Made her repetitive.

“What’s happened to you, to your face?” he said. “Come in, please. Come in.”

He led her through the door, wrapped his arm around her stripped bare carved shoulders. Her blood smeared down the front of his dress like mascara on a heavy night. He looked out into the street over his shoulder, kicked the door shut with his foot.

Tom and Joe were standing up when they went in the living room. Greg had had the foresight to throw a blanket over the bloodstained carpet. They had already dumped the wheelchair in the back garden, thrown it over the white-painted iron banisters, left the leather seat to rot. Ezra sat Tanya down in an armchair and knelt on the floor next to her, one hand laid on top of her own.

“Shit,” said Greg.

“Shut up,” said Ezra.

“What happened?” said Tom. “Oh god.”

“Is she okay?” said Greg.

“Why don’t you ask her?”

Greg walked over to Tanya. Rested his hand on her shoulder, squatted in front of her, next to Ezra.

“Tanya,” he said. Spoke softly. As if in a romance. As if a love had passed between them. The softness he couldn’t find for anyone else. Manufactured beautiful broken romance from fantasy and skewed cleansed memory. “Who did this?”

“I’m so sorry,” she said again. She rubbed her eyes with the back of her hands. Painted blood over her features. Thick on the philtrum it dripped onto her lips.

“Who did this Tanya?” said Joe. Sounded angry. He stepped from one foot to the other. Face pinched into action. Nostrils flared.

“Please,” she said.

“It’s okay,” said Ezra. He could sound assuring. “We’re here for you. We’re going to help you but you have to tell us what happened.”

“It’s Jack,” she said. Hyperventilating, hysterical, blood snorting, still poured out of her nose, real steady. And into her mouth. “My husband. Jack.”

Ezra looked to Joe, whose eyes had narrowed like an animal.

“Did he do this?” said Ezra.

“He went mad. He just... oh my god I’m so sorry.”

“Right,” said Joe. Yanked the door open so hard it hit the armchair. They heard the front door open. Didn’t close it. Could be forgiven in the circumstances.

“I couldn’t stop it,” she said. I tried but I couldn’t. He went mad. I tried to stop it. I was so scared.”

She clutched her fingers down into Ezra’s and started screaming. Like it had just sunk in. Like it kept sinking in.

“Oh Jesus no he’s got my baby. Oh god please help me he’s got my baby. I tried to stop it. Oh god please. My husband. It’s my husband. Oh please god help me.”

Ezra got up and put his arms around her.

“Everything’s going to be okay now. Joe’ll get your baby. It’s going to be okay.”

Tom and Jonathan were stood back. The look in their eyes more verbose than a thousand books. Explicit uncertainty in every imperceptible dilation. Greg squatted next to her. Ezra on his feet, arms around her. Comforting himself with the warmth of fear. Something wasn’t right here. Tom felt it in him. Nothing was.

*

Joe was running around the corner to where he knew Tanya’s building was. She lived on the top floor of a four-storey Victorian terrace. Not sure which one exactly. Coins hummed in his pockets. Hasty clipping of his running Cuban heels was weirdly archaic. There was no one about but it wasn’t that late. The slow grumble of bus engines drifted up from the main road. The constancy of transport kept the organs of the city alive. A black BMW had knocked one of their friends over a few weeks ago when he’d been fucking about at a bus stop. It just drove off and left him but he was okay. Cuts and bruises. Made his face more sheer. Joe stopped in front of the house he thought was hers. Tried to remember how he knew where she lived but couldn’t. The next house along had an open front door. Heavy wood painted bright red. Stained glass window at eye level. Supposed to be an orchid or something. Ornate knocker. That must be it. She left in such a state. Door would be open. He ran through the front door and straight up the stairs. Two at a time. Smelt like incense. Fabric softener. Boiled rice. Past the other flats. There was an electric stair lift running along the banisters of the three flights. Paid no attention to it. Tanya’s flat was at the top. Her door open as well. Streak of blood on the white gloss. He pushed it right open with his fingertips and edged into the hallway. Heart beating like fuck. Trying not to pant too loudly. Have to sneak up on the fucker.

There were family photographs framed and hanging on the walls all the way down the hall. Tanya smiling in all of them. Her husband too. Some had Lucas in, in the wheelchair. Big fucking smile. What a happy life. Left a bad taste in Joe’s mouth. He wanted to turn the pictures around. He peered into the first couple of doors off the corridor. Cursory inspection but there was nothing in them. Guy’s probably long gone. Wouldn’t hang around after what he did. Joe pulled the knife he used to slit Lucas’s throat out of his inside jacket pocket all the same. Extracted the blade.

“Jack?” he said.

Course it’s silent. Cunt wouldn’t answer. Stupid. At the end of the hallway Joe went through the door into the living room. Nicely decorated. Felt yellow. It was a good feeling. Shame about the domestic abuse. As he went further in he saw the mess. Ruined the ambience. Smashed glass, broken furniture. Looked like their house. A shit load of blood. Joe knelt down by a thick pool of it. The warm light made it a strange colour. Black pudding. There was something in the blood; he prodded it with the tip of the knife blade. Teeth. Whole fucking teeth. Root to crown. Bits of bloody periodontal ligament still fresh and attached. Joe recoiled, even with the knife. There were other blood patches around the carpet and on the sofas. Spatters up some of the walls.

“Fuck,” he said.

He stood up and looked back around the room. No one there either. Only one more room in the flat. Nothing to be scared of. He wasn’t going to be there anyway. Like he said: long gone. The door led off the living room. He could see the light was on in there from the crack at the bottom of the door but it didn’t mean anything. Probably just left it on like the dirty fucker left the front door open on his way out. Joe turned the handle slowly. Went in. Surveyed the scene at head height. There was no one in there. He let out a breath of relief. Gaze fell with it to the bed. He jumped back, screamed out “Jesus”. Ah fuck. Spread eagled naked on the bed. It was Jack from photographs, Tanya’s Jack. But this face was bare exposed flesh. Raw muscle. No smile. Skin peeled off like a blanched tomato. His lips had been removed. It made the gums look tall, tightly drawn back around half smashed out teeth. Scalp hacked, it had been cut and torn back in a thick wedge. The white of the skull bone flashed beneath the blood. Eyelids cut off left his eyes hauntingly open. Perpetually awake. Looked fucking massive. Golf balls. Face a mess of blood. Fucking flayed him. Huge wound running all the way down his chest from collar bone to cock. Countless stab marks cut into the flesh. Legs decorated with burns and incisions. Cock was gone though. Left a kind of bloody hole. The baby was laid next to him on the bed. Throat slit, soft head smashed in. Would have given out easily, like pushed meringue, like a damaged basket. Fingers cut off of its tiny hands. Father and child laid out together. Drenched in the blood of the other. Joe felt tears streaming down his cheeks. The sheets were sodden scarlet. The lamp cast a red light on the room from the blood splashed over its once white shade. Joe’s eyes blurred from crying but darted between them, the bodies, trying to take it in, or not take it in, to process something out of it. He squeezed his eyes closed but it was all still there when he opened them. Tanya. What the fuck had she done? He looked again at the baby. Tiny little baby. The sharp edges of its shattered skull torn through its skin. He threw up mercifully. Staggered backwards towards the door, tripping over fallen furniture. Couldn’t tear his eyes from the death. Or too afraid to. He felt the cool wood of the door pressed into his back. Managed to turn to it and pull it open. Get the fuck out. He knew it. Acid from the puke made his nose run. Rubbed his eyes dry with the sleeve of his jacket. Fucking hell the baby just a baby. And the face stripped like the ribs from a hog roast. Oh god the baby. He puked again. Looked up and saw the wheels. Gloved hands. It’s not. Face pale, loose flesh cut and hanging. Flaccid eyes loose in their sockets. Knife wound around the throat. Blonde hair blood-matted. Oh fuck. Flesh on the arms rotting off, from the wrist of the gloves upwards. Teeth yellowed stumps he was smiling head cocked, smiling at Joe.

It was Lucas.

Joe screamed. Lucas plunged a kitchen knife forwards and clean through his throat before he could take a step backwards. Scraped through the larynx. The tip jutted out the other side. Knife piercing the neck Joe twitched his life out, straight and vertical before the wheelchair, held upright by the wide metal of the blade. Fluttered convulsive. Dancing dead. Blood bubbled from the throat, from the mouth, right down his shirt front. The jerking feet made a terrible noise on the wooden floorboards. Cuban heels. Lucas was still, watching, one hand holding the knife. The twitching went on. Persistently trying to grip at life. The body couldn’t help it. It would stop eventually.

the tenancy agreement: chapter 12

2010-09-08T18:55:00.002+01:00

2005

November

Tom was vacuuming the sodden salt from the carpet. It was so wet and thick that it didn’t suck up easily, crystalline clumps breaking apart and darting across the carpet. It smelt like day-old raw meat shaken into washing up liquid. When he finally got the salt up the stain underneath was still there. It had faded from red down to a deep brown like a birthmark, as prominent as it had been the day before. Somehow more so with its dull tones. Greg, Joe and Jonathan were sitting on chairs around him with a plastic bag full of cans of lager at their feet. Despondent, they looked at the stain. A black eye on the face of the carpet. It said murder like a newspaper headline. Tom pushed the vacuum cleaner to one side and opened a can.

“That looks much better,” said Joe. They had to smile. It really did look shit.

“Yeah,” said Tom. He had spent most of the afternoon with an Irish girl he had met a couple of years earlier at a house party, kissing on the floor of her bedroom. Just half-hearted. To pass the time. Easier than conversation. They had always sort of wanted to fuck but it had never got around to happening. They tried it once drunk but it hurt. Her legs were a bit bowed and her feet pointed inwards. Her face was composed of sharp angles. She had invited him up to her room after a concert but they’d only talked about air travel. White walls and fairy lights. By that point too nervous or indifferent to do anything else. He imagined her cunt but it wasn’t with desire. And the white Gaelic skin that led to it. “I would say we’re going to lose our deposit but we killed our landlord yesterday.”

Greg smirked over his ring pull.

“Could be worse,” he said.

“Much worse,” said Jonathan.

“It’s fine,” said Joe.

“Completely,” said Tom.

They all four took a pull on their beers. It looked like a synchronized act. Measured and precise. A modern callisthenic ritual.

“Where’re Ezra and Conor?” said Jonathan.

“Ezra’s in there,” said Tom, gesturing towards his bedroom. “Haven’t seen Conor all day.”

“Probably went out,” said Greg.

Jonathan stood up and went and knocked on Ezra’s door.

“You want a beer?” he said.

They came back in together, Ezra opening a can. He looked at the stain and shook his head.

“Who put that salt down there?” he said after three, four mouthfuls. He drank beer from the corner of his mouth. You could see it pouring out of the can between his parted lips. Dissipating specks of foam in his beard.

“Me,” said Tom.

“It looks bloody awful.”

“I know. I thought salt was supposed to help with red stains.”

“It does,” said Joe.

“Yeah, it does,” said Ezra. “But only if you put it down straight away, and only if you haven’t made a soaking mess of fairy liquid and shit beforehand.”

“We had to do something,” said Tom.

“And now we still have to do something,” said Ezra.

“That’s enough,” said Greg. Bored of it.

“It does look terrible,” said Jonathan.

“And we’re out of salt,” said Tom.

Ezra drained his beer and opened another. Looked at the four of them as he took the first swallow.

“To be honest it’s not the carpet we should be worrying about,” he said eventually.

“What do you mean?” said Joe.

“It’s probably the body in the basement we need to deal with.”

“We’ve discussed this,” said Greg. “We don’t know what to do with it.”

“We need to do something. Tom’s right: it will smell. Very soon. And if anyone else comes knocking looking for a missing man, I don’t want to be the one trying to explain what the stench is.”

He had read about a research centre in the USA where they have corpses laid outside on a patch of grass behind security fences so they can assess the stages of decay and decomposition. And an immortal jellyfish, turritopsis nutricula. When a corpse is embalmed they place a modesty cloth over the genitalia. Dead on a table and they have to hide the sex organs. Sanitize my dead parts for the good of yourselves, your vision! Perhaps a limp penis makes it too personal. The horror of an exposed, coarsely hirsute declivity. Too dirty. Insufficiently presentable.

“Okay. What do we do?” said Greg.

“We tidy up,” said Ezra. He rested one hand on his knee. “Simple.”

“But what are we going to actually do?” Aggression felt bloated under the surface of Greg’s patronising emphasis.

“I say we get the body back up here, wait until later and then take it somewhere and bury it,” said Jonathan.

“Where do we take it and bury it?” said Greg. Sharp-voiced. “We haven’t got a car and I don’t think they’ll let us take him on the night bus.”

“What about the park?”

“It’s a public park,” said Ezra. “How are we going to have time to dig a grave in a public park, much less not get noticed doing it. It’s not going to happen.”

“What about the river?” said Joe. Pillaging his brain for the city’s natural resources. It had hidden death for centuries. Swallowed it in its concrete and its topography. A city built around death. “Walk him down to Greenwich and just dump him in the water.”

“Do-able but not ideal,” said Greg. “Fucker’ll end up floating up somewhere and they’ll have him identified and be knocking that fucking door down.”

“And then how will we explain the stain?” said Tom. He lit a cigarette. “That’d be a lot of red wine.”

“Look, carrying him anywhere has got to be a bad idea. This may be London but you can’t just carry a dead body around, even here. People notice that kind of thing. Notice it and don’t like it.” Ezra was massaging one temple as he spoke. His fingers crackled over his hair.

“Then what do you have in mind?” said Joe. “The garden?”

Ezra raised an eyebrow. His mouth formed a smile from its sneer. An involuntary motion.

“You’re serious,” said Greg. “You want to bury our landlord in his own back garden?”

“Why not? It makes perfect sense. As Joe said himself, half of the hole’s already dug, and it’s near enough six feet. We just need to bang him in there” – he clapped as he said it, emphasizing the simplicity – “and fill it in.”

“It’s private, I suppose,” said Jonathan.

“Entirely. And the neighbour’s will be glad to see the back of that fucking hole.”

“I’m not sure,” said Tom.

“I’m telling you, it’s the safest option,” said Ezra. “The police don’t just dig up a garden because a grown man goes missing. They need suspicion, and why the hell would they assume a few university kids would wind up doing some massive murder burial cover-up thing? They wouldn’t, is the answer.”

He took a cigarette from Tom’s packet and lit it. Satisfied suck. His lips clicked around the butt. He looked at Joe. For consensus.

“Beats carrying him around London,” said Joe.

He looked at Greg.

“I haven’t got a better idea,” said Greg.

He looked at Jonathan.

“We need to get him out of that basement,” said Jonathan.

He looked at Tom.

“Okay, I’m in,” said Tom. “But there’s something else I think we should take care of.”

“What?” said Ezra.

“Hands. And teeth.”

“Jesus that’s fucking sick,” said Greg.

“What do we have to do?” said Joe. Sounded interested. He was big into fishing and slaughtering animals for meat, acts tinged with the seed of psychopathy. It sat uncomfortably with his vocational urbanity. He justified it by eating them, but anyone could see it was about more than food. When he had been on holiday in Africa he had reverted to a primal state. The rumour was that he smoked street heroin in his hotel room and then tried to hunt birds bare-chested with a bow and arrow. Climbed trees in torn bootcut jeans and tattered suede boots. Scared off the birds with the glare of his sunglasses.

“Cut them off and knock them out. Makes it a bit harder to identify.”

“He’ll be buried,” said Ezra. “There’ll be no identification.”

“Just in case. We’re not going to live here forever, and I don’t want this coming back and fucking me in ten years. It’s a shit job but we get it done now and that’s it, it’s dealt with.”

Greg gave a measured snort. He wanted clean hands but there was blood in his veins. His fingernails were tainted.

“Well I’m not doing it,” he said. He put a few fingers into his pocket.

“We’re all fucking doing it,” said Tom.

“I can’t.”

“You have to.”

“We’ll do it Greg,” said Jonathan. “We can do it.”

“It seems unnecessary,” said Ezra.

“Just humour me. I think it’s the best idea. It severs something.” Tom blinked when he spoke. His life felt small before him. “Weirdly makes it faceless. An end to personality. A lot of people see the soul in the hands, like they’re the most personal thing we have.”

“Agreed,” said Joe.

It was dark out. Ezra stood up, put his empty can down on the table.

“Now?” he said.

They all stood up.

“Shit, let’s get this done quickly,” said Greg.

They walked in single file down the hallway to the basement. It hadn’t taken long for everything to become normal, the shock of the murder engulfed in the movements of their still occurring lives. Moral concerns soon become practical. There was resignation not remorse in their complaints. It was like they had broken a window or left the tap running. Life itself a disposable commodity of occasional convenience. Start of a century. Defend our awful selves.

“So what’s the plan?” said Jonathan at the door.

“We get down there, get him up here, cut his hands off and smash his teeth out and then bury the bastard in the swimming pool.” Greg spoke like he was reading from an instruction manual. Following line diagrams for a flat-packed wardrobe. Key actions circled and magnified.

“What shall we do with the... trimmings?” said Ezra.

“We can burn the hands next time we have a fire,” said Tom. “And just hide the teeth.”

“Hide?” said Ezra. Tom nodded. “Okay.”

“You seem to know a lot about this,” said Joe, to Tom.

“I watch films.”

“Well let’s go,” said Jonathan.

“Right,” said Greg.

“Here we go,” said Ezra.

“To the basement,” said Tom.

“Down the hatch,” said Joe.

Nobody moved. They nodded like they were party to a critically decisive action but their eyes hugged the floor that their focus stayed flat down upon.

“Fuck it,” said Greg. He pulled the basement door open. It reeked of piss but none of them noticed. Didn’t notice Conor’s dressing gown, soaked and screwed in a ball amongst all the other clothes on the stairs. He moved his foot towards the top step. Tom grabbed his arm. Hissed loud whispers into his ear.

“Wait, wait,” he said. Greg jumped. Playing for time. Not the fucking basement. Just the thought of the smell was like something solid stuck in the throat. Choke on the possible, the prospective. Choke on an uncertain olfactory outcome of a future event. Please give me the Heimlich manoeuvre.

“What?” he said.

“I think we better get him into the bath. To cut him up I mean. We don’t want to fuck up the carpet any more than we have already.”

“That’s it?” said Greg. Frown spread over his face like make up.

“Yes.”

“Well for fuck’s sake, don’t make me jump like that. We’ll get him out of the fucking basement first, then we’ll worry about getting him up the stairs.”

“Okay,” said Tom. “Sorry. Let’s go.”

Greg went down a few steps. Why wasn’t there a light on the stairs? Someone must have moved the torch. Carpet felt damp under the soles of his trainers but he paid no attention. Looked back at the other four, still stood like exhibits peering through glass at his stuttered descent.

“Look you’re coming down here too,” he said. “I’m not doing this on my own.”

They do. Looked at each other and then Joe started to follow Greg, and the others fell into line with the measured slow progress of a silent carnival parade. An Alejandro funeral. Smelt less than they thought it would. Maybe the door kept it in. Maybe the decay was slower than they’d imagined. It’d hit them when they pulled the door. Dead atoms breathed into the lungs – they’d feel the end inside them. Taste death on their flat tongues with the clarity of a prophet’s vision. Death waited in carpets rolled in basement tunnels. Until then it just smelt vaguely like piss, a passing waft. Was that how it smelt, a whole life reduced to the odour of a common excretion, a crucial body function? They crept down the steps as though they might wake him up.

Lucas Manckiewicz
Son, brother and man
Who fell asleep
A night or so ago.

The unmade headstone. The unmarked memorial. It would only exist in the knowledge of their actions. They stopped at the bottom. Their breaths were loud and heavy with nerves. The electricity meter clicked through quantifiable units.

“So,” said Greg, “we’ll pull him out of here and get him up the stairs. Agreed?”

Mumbled assent. Hard to motivate for this kind of thing. Not a lot to say.

“Typical fucking Conor,” said Ezra. “Missing the difficult bit.”

“Where is Conor?” said Joe. A night off coke had made his voice sound younger.

“I don’t know. I saw him this morning.”

“He’s probably off with his other friends,” said Jonathan.

“He’s got the right idea,” said Tom.

“Yeah, well fuck Conor,” said Greg, trying to clap them into action. Anxiety made him organised. Fear made him managerial. Both odd traits for a man of Greg’s insubstantial work ethic. He spoke like a marshal at a team building conference. Dulled and nasal. “We’ve still got to get this done. He can clean the carpet. I’m going to open the door.”

They all instinctively moved backwards. Greg flicked on the light switch on the right of the door and then started to open it crack by crack. It would have creaked in a horror film but it was silent. They squinted into the light that swamped the darkness. Blinked their eyes in adjustment. Their presence there felt shameful.

“Oh shit,” said Greg.

Peering into the tunnel. The fuck was he talking about? Followed his eyes and then they saw it. Rug unrolled and thick with blood and flanked by busted furniture and brick dust piles but empty. No body. Unrolled and no body. Wasn’t in the tunnel wasn’t in the basement. No body.

“What the cunt?” said Tom. Unconcealed alarm. The beginning of an asthma episode.

“This is a problem,” said Ezra.

“Where is he?” said Jonathan.

“He’s not here,” said Joe. He stepped onto the rug and walked knees bent down the tunnel. Lifted some bits of wood like a languid search party.

“He must be here,” said Greg. “We killed him and dumped him down here. He couldn’t just get up and wander off.”

“Maybe he wasn’t dead?” said Tom. “You read about it all the time. Bells in coffins. Shredded fingernails. Ah fuck.” Hands gripped on the sides of his head. Felt like he was going to puke. Rich smell of blood. Earthy they say now.

“Wasn’t dead?” said Greg. “You saw him. We kicked his face apart and he slit his throat. He was dead.”

“Then where is he?” said Ezra.

“I don’t know so stop fucking asking me.”

“Maybe he wasn’t dead,” said Tom again. Peering down the tunnel to Joe. Looking for a body. Willing it back. “Maybe we just knocked him out or something. And he got out and...”

“Tom, Tom, he was dead,” said Ezra. “And even if he wasn’t we rolled him up in a rug. How the fuck would you roll your gravely injured body back out of a rug heavy with your own fucking blood?”

“Shit. Oh shit,” said Tom.

“We’re fucked,” said Greg. “This is fucked.”

“A body doesn’t just disappear,” said Joe. His eyes looked tear swollen.

“And no one’s been in here but us,” said Jonathan.

Ezra clicked his fingers, his face stretched into a smile.

“Conor,” he said.

“What about him?” said Greg. “You think he took him with him?”

“Maybe he dealt with it.”

“I don’t think so.”

“I have a bad feeling,” said Tom. Jumper soaked with sweat but his skin felt cold. Anomalous body.

“That’s because you killed your landlord and the body’s gone walkabout,” said Ezra. “I imagine a bad feeling’s a pretty natural response to something like that.”

“What are we supposed to do?” said Joe.

“Get the hell upstairs for one thing.”

“A dead body doesn’t disappear,” said Jonathan.

“He was dead, wasn’t he?” said Tom.

“HE WAS DEAD. WE FUCKING KILLED HIM.” Greg was shouting. Confusion made him spiteful. Doom made him violent.

“Then where the fuck is he?”

“I DON’T KNOW.”

“Let’s continue this riveting conversation upstairs,” said Ezra. “There must be an explanation. Bodies don’t just vanish. Let’s phone Conor and get rational. Get philosophical. There’s no need to panic yet. The police aren’t hammering on the door, are they, so I think it’s fair to assume that Lucas hasn’t been staggering around the city and telling anyone who’ll listen exactly what happened to him. All we need to do is think. There’s always a rational explanation.”

“Rational explanation fucking nothing,” said Tom. “A disappearing corpse goes against rational, don’t you think?”

“You’re a shit atheist, Tom,” said Ezra. Gut swollen with the poorly digested memories of his own degree topics. “Let’s just get upstairs before we start jumping to any generic conclusions, shall we?”

He pushed past the others and went up the stairs. He wore cheap white trainers tightly laced on his feet beneath the dress. They made him look like a doctored photograph.

“Come on,” he said from the top step. Greg turned the light out and closed the door to the tunnel. They followed him out and walked their damp piss footprints through the house, the smell of blood still behind them like a shadow.

the tenancy agreement: chapter 11

2010-09-01T18:42:00.001+01:00

2005

November

Conor strolled out of his bedroom in light steeped in early afternoon. Stretching loudly. He walked past the basement door, the kitchen and to the living room. He peered in but the room was empty, salt piled on the bloodstain.

“Guys?” he said loudly. There was no reply. Must have been gone lunchtime. “Anyone home?” No reply again. He shrugged and went back to the kitchen and picked up the kettle. Screamed awfully and hopped onto one foot. Stepped in glass. There was blood seeping out of his thick soles. It ran in a single careful line from the wound, down to the base of his toes. Because of the elevation. He put the kettle down and picked the glass out, a piece about two inches long and broken into a perfect point. It made a sound like kissing on the way out. He threw it in the bin and wiped the blood off with a tea towel. Screwed in a ball and sodden on the surface. The colour of tea. Kettle filled and on it started to boil. He turned on the radio loud and put a slice of bread in the toaster. It was the crust end. An act of desperate finality. It was too thick for the toaster compartment and he had to coax it down. About thirty seconds later the kettle stopped mid boil. Toaster popped up. Radio flicked off. He pulled open the fridge and the light was off. Darkness among the milk carton and the mayonnaise jar.

“Fucking electricity,” he said.

They had a prepayment meter with a plastic key and only ever bought the minimum amount. It ran out almost constantly. The meter was in the basement, just at the bottom of the stairs. Next to the tunnel. He opened the basement door and looked down the stairwell. It was the same as always but he knew there was a body. He had helped carry it down. Don’t be fooled by the tennis racquet covers. There was no light on the stairs. The carpet was loose. It hung red from the contours of the steps like it had been left there by mistake. The door was closed at the bottom. How they left it.

“Hello?” he said. Shouted. Not taking his eyes from the stairway. He held a torch in his hand. They left it by the basement for just this reason. “Guys? We’re out of electricity. Guys? Shit.”

The house was even quieter without the humming of the fridge. He didn’t want to go down there alone but it was either that or sit in darkness until someone else got back. It was dark early in November. He stepped down onto the first step. It creaked loudly. Conor shone the torch into the stairway, craning his neck to see. There was nothing there, just piles of clothes. He licked the corner of his lips. They were so claret they looked sore.

“Guys?” he said again. “Is anyone in the house?” It was empty. Of course. Perfect. To himself: “Fuck. I’ll have to do it.”

He shone the torch again and started down the stairs. Must have only been, what, ten degrees? Twelve at most. It felt hotter. His face was damp with sweat. Was that flies buzzing? Already? He didn’t know how quickly a body decomposed. He remembered reading that it was quicker than you’d think. Or maybe that it was slower than you’d think. It sounded rich with the life of insects. They feasted themselves to birth. Swallowed the mess of death to make life of their own. Under slipping skin and liquefied cells. It’s the way the world works. Life makes death and death makes life. Amplified by the basement walls the buzzing was claustrophobic. His heart oscillated with it. He got to the bottom, slumped in the piles, felt snapped wood scrape his calf. It was so hot. Bowels of the earth. Flies like a wall of noise behind the door. Must have been thousands. Drunk on the product of the autolysing cells. He pointed the torch at the electricity meter. It said Credit £4.50. He pulled the key out and shone the torch on it, then plugged it back in. The radio came back on upstairs. It was Bobby Darin. “Dream Lover”. Conor shrugged and started back up the stairs. He turned the torch off because of the light from the back door. He was walking into the light. The kettle restarted the boiling process, sounded like an aeroplane flying overhead. About halfway up he tripped and fell down onto his hands. He looked down at his ankle, tried yanking it away from whatever it was caught in.

“I hate this fucking mess,” he said, and meant it.

He pulled at his leg a few more times, bent down and tried to free it. His ankle was caught between two planks of wood, he saw it when he angled the torch down. Joe must have left them there. He sighed with a bit of relief and pushed the wood to one side. Continued up the stairs. There was a loud crash from the bottom of the basement. From behind the door. From the tunnel. Like smashing furniture. Like something was moving. Only loud. It drowned out the radio and the kettle and the flies. Only for a second but a second can be long. A slow second. Then the flies again. They weren’t there for him.

“Hello?” he said. The tone of his voice said more than a sentence. It faltered like a cold car engine. He felt vulnerable in his dressing gown. The dark-striped towelling was abrasive. Don’t let him piss in a dressing gown.

No reply just appliances. Conor swallowed and stood up, started creeping towards the top. Another crash from the bottom. He froze up. Couldn’t move his legs. It was louder than the first, sounded like something had hit the door. He heard the cheap wood crack some from the impact. Like it had been hit from the inside. He felt his bladder want to quit. Gave him something to focus on. There was a scraping sound on the door. He could hear it. It was like fingernails. Knew it couldn’t be but that’s how it sounded. Fingernails. Scraping to get out. It was getting louder. Don’t piss yourself. You know it’s not. Fuck, but listen. It was definitely scraping. He could hear it.

“Shit, hello?”

The scraping went on. It was faster. Uncontrolled. Scraping. Frantic.

“Hello? Oh God. Hello?”

He was leaning his head down, peering down the stairway, trying to see the door, see what the fuck was going on. The torch light was too dull to make it out. The scraping just got louder. And so fucking fast. He turned and ran up the last few stairs but the door slammed shut in his face. Knocked him back a step. He felt the warmth of piss on his legs. It pooled out from the bottom of his dressing gown, soaked the stairs carpet, hit it with the sound of an overflow pipe. The scraping. It became a thumping at the door at the bottom of the stairs. Four thumps a second. He was soaked in piss in the darkness. The only light was the failing torch beam. He hammered on the door, turned the handle, shouted out, screamed. It didn’t give. The scraping and the thumping was deafening. He had to shout to hear himself over it.

“Guys! The door’s stuck! Shit. Get me out!”

He had his back to the bottom of the stairs, pounding his fists into the door. The noise from the bottom sounded closer. It was moving. It was right on top of him. He had set the torch on the floor. Its little light seemed red from the carpet. The door wouldn’t move. He heard a creak on the step behind him. Heard the piss wet carpet slurp.

“Oh fuck,” he said, like a prayer.

He started to turn around. He had to see it. The scraping. The thumping. So loud. It was right there. It was. He screamed. A real scream. It spoke of pain. He clasped at his guts. He felt them go. He dropped to the floor. The dark basement darker still. His blood smelt metallic. He couldn’t speak. The scraping. The thumping. So loud. Couldn’t think over it. He felt his body pulled down the stairs. He saw the rectangle of light that shone around the edges of the closed basement door. He saw the electricity meter. He saw the torch falling down the stairs behind him. He heard the scraping stop. He heard Bobby Darin.

the tenancy agreement: chapter 10

2010-08-30T09:49:00.001+01:00

2005

November

Greg was running a bath in the clinical light. He heard the others go off to their rooms. The white tub had layered black rims like centuries of sediment, ancient dirt imprinting its memory on the physical world. Water fell so slowly from the taps, tepid at best. It felt like a bad lifetime just to get an inch. No bubbles. It looked murky in the discoloured tub. He felt sick when he pulled his clothes off. Piled them on the floor as far away as he could. The jeans, the shoes, the socks, the pants. Witnesses. Saw it all. His skinny body was grey in the bathroom. He climbed into the bath and the water only came up to his ankles. He sat down, clutched his knees up tight to his chest. There was blood under some of his fingernails. Dark like dirt but it washed out red. He scrubbed at his hands so hard that water showered out of the bath and onto the floor. The taps were still running slowly. He started screaming, screaming fuck fuck fuck, and his voice was hoarse. The words became sobs, heaves, tears. He cried and held his knees to his chest. His thin legs. His long feet. Why had she licked his cheek? Felt like her fucking tongue print was branded into his flesh. Her tits, dark blue veins like tattoos by the bumps of her areola. Her neck, her jeans running up to her amenable cunt. Her tongue flicking over his cheek, smooth like a teenager. Saw it in his eyelids. Why had it been him? His crying was muffled by the sound of the water falling.

*

The living room had an upright lamp switched on. The sky was half-light in the cracks, where the curtains hung down from the tops of the windows. Tom was hunched over the bloodstain, scrubbing it with a wet kitchen cloth. There was a part-drunk mug of instant coffee on the table next to him. He was in a vest with his jeans. The bucket he rinsed the cloth in was full of pinkish water. Blood-coloured bubbles foaming on the stain. Scrubbed up, rung out then scrubbed again. His arms were shaking with the effort. The bubbles reappeared with every scrub, oozed out of the stain. It got pinker, not any better. It was deep into the fibres. Irreversible, like the act itself. Fingerprint of an evening. Of an entire narrative.

“Fuck it,” said Tom. Pointless effort.

He stood up and threw the cloth back into the bucket. His vest was soaked in sweat in a circle on the chest and smeared with blood. He took a sip from the coffee, grimaced as it went down. He rubbed the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. It left blood on his face from the cleaning. He walked out of the room but was back within seconds carrying a big pot of table salt. He poured it all over the stain and sat down in an armchair. Lit another cigarette. Then got up and opened the curtains. It looked even worse in the light.

*

The morning sun streamed rich sickly yellow through the tinted honey glass of the back door. Ezra walked into it from his bedroom. The yellow felt holy. He was wearing a thick grey dress that hung shapeless to his knees. Something Indian. It had become a part of his character, a token of life’s own absurdity, the remnant of a relationship. He stood at the bottom of the stairs and listened for movement. Nothing. They were asleep.

He crossed the hall and went into the living room. There was a layer of wet salt over the blood stain. It had turned grey not red. Looked like a skin condition. Fucking idiot must have tried to clean it first. He took a cigarette from a packet on the table and lit it with a match. Stepped over the salt and opened up the curtains. November sun only burns in silence. He turned back to the room and saw Lucas in the armchair –

“Jesus!” said Ezra. His body jumped.

It was him alright. Face tanned and asleep. He looked okay. Just there, resting – like he always had been. An esoteric twist to the magnolia decor. No cuts, no smashed features. Ezra remembered kicking his face and feeling bone give way. The way the windpipe whistled. The way the mouth gurgled like a sink or an alien life form. Remembered carrying the body down to the basement wrapped up in a rug, stripped of personality by their own thorough violence. He crept towards the armchair. He had smoke in his eyes. He reached out one hand to touch Lucas’s face, to feel the mass of reality, his fingertips on the warm flesh. It was there. It gave a little with his touch. He was in the armchair. Ezra smelt his shampoo. He was there.

“Ezra?” said Conor. He was in boxer shorts, stood in the doorway. Ezra pulled away. “What are you doing?”

“I was just...” He looked back at the armchair. Conor looked too. He knew it would be empty. “Nothing.”

“Okay. I’m going to try and get some more sleep. It’s early.”

“Sure,” said Ezra. He was still looking at the chair. He rubbed his fingertips together gently. He could feel the skin, the resistance he had felt pushing up against life. Conor left him alone. Ezra leant his hand out towards the armchair, groping at the emptiness, trying to reconstruct a person from the spaces they used to occupy. To sculpt them back into existence. To feel them back into life.

The room was so empty he couldn’t be sure that even he was in it.

the tenancy agreement: chapter 9

2010-08-26T18:21:00.002+01:00

2005

November

The only light in the stairwell came from the kitchen. The basement had one bare bulb hanging from a short flex, but it was behind the door at the bottom of the stairs. They hadn’t thought to prop it open. All six of them were sagging down the stairs like dumped laundry, dragging the body behind them, wrapped up on itself in the middle of the rug, a coarse woven shroud found dumped on the street. Ezra had pulled it back to the house, said he felt an affinity with it, and there it was wrapped around the lifeless body of a former cripple. They kept dropping their corners and it fell with dead thuds. Dead like pig hide, scrap parts, felled tree, demolished property. When a pig’s stunned with a captive bolt pistol it catastrophically damages the cerebrum but leaves the brain stem intact, then they slit its throat. Heart keeps on pumping the blood out. The obedience of meticulously domesticated biological processes! Aiding and abetting your own exsanguination! On the dark stairs the body-filled carpet roll fell with the kind of abandon only the deceased can muster. Their shoulders were crunching into the wood panelled walls that lined the stairwell. Then a knock at the front door. Rang through them all like bullets, three gunshots, a noise deafening in the void left by absent conversation. Thunderous knocking – the doorbell long broken – even louder than their breathing. It was hard heavy work. It was a knock alright.

“Fuck,” said Greg. He let the head end drop to his feet and listened. They all dropped it, the rolled rug almost as long as the stairs were tall, held it in place.

“Who’s that?” said Tom. The game’s up. Said as much in his eyeballs.

Greg put his finger over his lips. Three more gunshot knocks, six in total. One for each of them. Them murderers.

“Maybe they’ll go away,” said Tom, a sharp whisper.

“Shhh!” said Greg and Ezra together, craning their heads to listen.

The front door opened loudly. They were coming in. The living room. The blood. They could hear the door open. Rattling against its own frame.

“Hello?” It was a jovial male voice. “Anyone home?”

“Shit,” said Greg. “I think it’s the guy from next door.”

He ran up the rug and into the hallway. Couldn’t let the nosy bastard see the living room. He remembered to pull on a clean t-shirt on the way. The guy was standing just inside the front door, a friendly-looking fat face and balding, thickset in torso and grinning enthusiastically. He was wearing supermarket jeans and a loose grey t-shirt, a number cheaply screen-printed on its front, the name of an American state. Massachusetts or California or Michigan. All an allusion to the nameless sport he never played, never even thought about. The screen-print was cracking but it was a deliberate design method. Supposed to give it a sanitized retro trend-type. There was a caption too, printed in italics in big inverted commas. “Playing the hardest ball since ’72!” or something. It was the Americanization of his own memories channelled through supermarket fashion, his own nostalgia replaced by the recurring themes of Beach Boys records and cinematic cliché. It was an outfit of staggering blandness, steeped in reassurance. His grin doubled in width when he saw Greg coming towards him. He had sweat on his forehead.

“Can I help?” said Greg.

“Hello there,” said the neighbour, his voice like he worked in insurance sales and was talking on the telephone. “I’m Tony.” He extended his hand and Greg shook it limply. The blood on his hand was long dry. He had washed some of it off but he could still see bits, patches like a birthmark that he needed to scrub. He clasped his hands behind his back. “You boys okay around here?” Tony continued. “We thought we heard some... disturbances?” He rose it into a question. Neighbourhood diplomacy at its finest. South East London: a shining example to the world.

“Disturbances?” Greg looked about the hall, as if – even when looking, really looking, you could see him looking – he couldn’t for single second conceive of what these alleged disturbances might have been. This was a house without disturbance. That much was obvious from Greg, looking. Look at him looking for disturbances. Hasn’t found shit. Nothing. Not a peek. Or maybe... that’s it. He clicked his fingers. Greg did. A eureka moment. Was it overblown? Fuck it, he’d just killed a cripple. “Disturbances, right, of course,” he said, acting nonchalant. “We were decorating. Painting, actually. The mantelpiece.”

“Decorating? At” – he looked at his digital wristwatch – “three o’clock on a Sunday morning?”

“Strike while the iron’s hot,” said Greg through a vacuum-packed smile. “That’s kind of our house motto.” Bullshit. It said never regret revelry above the front door. Painted blue.

“Indeed,” said Tony, warmed against his better judgement to his own sizeable innards by enterprising, can-do attitudes. He rubbed his chin, eyes locked on Greg’s, smiling with an awkward constancy. He peered over Greg’s shoulder, as if he was trying to get past him, to confirm or deny the decorating story, to see for himself the masterwork of the newly painted mantelpiece. He didn’t buy it. Don’t be fooled by the smile. Knows what he heard and it wasn’t painting. What was it? Assault? Rape? Violence? Greg blocked his path as politely as possible. There was a loud thud from the basement. Tony looked right into Greg’s face, eyebrows cocked like hairy pistols. “What was that?” he said.

“What was what?” said Greg. He swallowed drily after the sentence. Thirsty work this unplanned murder.

“That thud. Sounded like it was coming from the basement.” He knew the layout of the house, of course he did. All the houses in the terrace were the same, or at least mirror images of the one next door.

“The basement? Oh right. That was just Joe. He’s doing some work down there.”

“I see. Just Joe. Doing a bit of work.”

“Exactly,” said Greg, same tight smile.

“Well, as long as it’s not another swimming pool.”

“Not this time.” Greg’s knees felt weak. His heart hurt with relief.

“Okay son.” They shook hands again, for what felt like too long. “You students seem to keep pretty strange hours.”

“Yeah. We’re really sorry if we disturbed you. Just lost track of time again, I guess.”

“That’s okay. Just try to keep it down in future, okay? Goodnight.”

“Goodnight,” said Greg. He waved. Did that look normal? Waving to someone standing right next to you at three in the morning? He couldn’t tell. Tony walked to the front door but turned back to look at Greg, who was standing rooted to the same spot, grinning wearily, like he couldn’t hold his cheeks up. Tony walked back to him, shuffling with distraction.

“You know it sounds a bit odd but the wife swears blind that she heard screaming, of all the mad things. Coming from here.” He tapped his hand on the cold wall. “That’s why I came over, really. The wife. Real screaming, she said. Horrible screaming.” They looked at each other. Greg could feel a drop of sweat in his eyebrow. He waited for it to fall, to hit his eye, waited for the sting. He was fucked. He felt fucked. There wasn’t a thing he could say. “There wasn’t any screaming, was there?” Again he was trying to peer behind Greg, over his shoulder, into the house. The living room. Greg shook his head, paragon of arch sincerity.

“No, no I don’t... wait a minute,” he said, just then remembering. Of course! How obvious! “You said screaming?” Tony’s turn to nod. “Of course. That’ll be Joe again. He tends to scream while he decorates.” As an aside: “It’s just his thing.” Like he’s talking about a medical condition, a recognisable and diagnosed mania. “We’ve tried telling him but...”

“Right, right,” said Tony. “Old habits and all that. Just try to” – he tapped an index finger on the face of his wristwatch.

“Of course. We’ll keep a better eye on the time. And like I say, we’re really sorry to have disturbed you. Again.”

“No problem.”

He walked back to the front door, his back turned to Greg, who stayed right where he was. He deliberated for a second. His fingers were on the door handle, Greg was willing him out, away, but he strolled the same few paces back into the house, hands in his jeans pockets.

“You know Lucas is a good friend of ours,” he said. Greg felt pale, felt the blood drain out of his face.

“He’s a good man,” said Greg quietly, clutching onto the present tense.

“He is. One of the best. And he likes us to keep a bit of an eye on the place. When we can.”

“It’s the smart thing to do.”

Tony inspected Greg, looked him up and down like produce at a market, like a whore in a window. He nodded, apparently satisfied.

“Good stuff,” he said. “Goodnight then.”

Greg waved again. Didn’t have the energy to speak. Tony fucked off, closed the door firmly behind him with a kind of half wave. Shit. Shithead. Fuckbrain. Fountaincock. Greg gasped like he’d been underwater and rushed back to the basement.

They were all hunched in stasis on the stairway, clutching loosely at odd bits of the rug-rolled corpse, which had slipped further down the stairs so the head pressed into the door at the bottom with all the indignity of discarded soft furnishings. They belched out sighs of collective relief at Greg’s silhouette, blocking what little light there was from their eyes and hands.

“He’s gone,” said Greg.

“What did he want?” said Jonathan.

“Wanted to know what the noise was.” Greg squinted at the rug. “What was that fucking banging. Sounded like a dead body being dropped.”

“It was,” said Conor. His eyes were huge and blue and simple and his lips deep red against his pale Irish heritage, like beetroot sliced onto a white dinner plate, like thick crayon lines on a blank page. You couldn’t tell in the dark. “I lost my grip.”

“That’s great,” said Greg. “We need to be a lot more fucking careful.”

“Look can we just get him down here?” said Joe. He was drained by narcotics.

Greg walked down a few steps and picked up the foot end of the heavy roll. The others tried to get their arms around it, like it was a blanket they were carrying under their arms to picnic.

“We have to pull it up first to get the door open,” said Greg.

They pulled at it. Ezra dropped his section.

“Fuck,” he said, shouting. “This is absurd.”

“Have you got a better idea?” said Tom.

Ezra sneered and grabbed the rug again. He supported it on his knee while he got a better hold on it and they pulled it up a couple of steps. Joe’s hand got crushed against the wall and he punched the rug with his free hand, its lifelessness making for effective stress relief. Ezra pulled the door open and turned on the light, and they all squinted troglodyte eyes at the illuminated honesty of the exposed sixty watts. It picked out blood stains in electric truth. Ruined Levis. That’ll never wash out. It made a confessional of the stuffy basement. No hiding from that light. Oh watered down red on once white vests now tobacco yellow! The streaks may be pink but their organic – or rather to say, HUMAN – origin remained obvious, more so in the bulb glare. Oh sweat rivulets pooled in chest hair! Squelch beneath thumbs and make your brine ponds in fluffy umbilici! Oh scuffed knuckles, skin torn through like a threadbare trouser set! Oh beards, dashed in chaotic action with all the bloody remnants of surprise murder! In the light of the basement the clarity of the twenty-first century was amplifying the grotesque to obscene definition. It smelt like dust burning on the bulb. Microscopic particles incinerated by the unbearable heat of revelation. Their veins looked an incredible blue. Their imperfections grew exponentially.

“Bastard,” said Greg, dropping his end of the rug and rubbing his hands down the front of his jeans. He was talking about the body.

“Heavy for a cripple,” said Joe.

“It’s all the sitting down,” said Tom. “Everything he eats just congregates in his guts like lead shit, poor bastard.”

“Let’s get him in there,” said Greg, pointing to the doorway, the tunnel behind it. It was only about five and a half feet from floor to ceiling but went back about twenty, its walls of bare red brick, the ancient plaster just pouring out from between them like dry sand, and it was stuffed with bits of broken furniture and weird clothes and suitcases. They dragged the body into the tunnel and walked over the top of it to get back out. Cunt was dead anyway.

“It’s still going to smell,” said Jonathan.

“We’ll have to get a tarp or something,” said Greg. He was nodding. Like he was reassuring himself. His tendency toward practical solutions depended on the right tools for the job. “I need some wood glue anyway. This’ll take care of it in the short-term.”

“We’ll have to bury it,” said Tom.

“We can use the swimming pool,” said Joe. Irony swamped by his own misplaced pride. For Joe the square dirt hole was a swimming pool. A swimming pool more than the sum of its shit parts. The swimming pool was a grave. He had dug it weeks ago. Was it cocaine prophecy, self-fulfilled, body and all? Muddy grave leads to body, wrapped in a rug and dumped in a basement. Needs it like a gun needs to shoot. To be purposeful. To be itself. It couldn’t be different to how it was. Nothing could. Balls in fate’s mouth. It’s fucking Joe again. Big Joe.

“This is a big mistake,” said Ezra.

“Killing him was the mistake,” said Conor. “Sorting the mess out is the only thing we can do.”

They each lit cigarettes. The nicotine made their legs feel weak. The air felt thin, like the dead body had pulled all the life out of it, leaving a vacuum where it used to be. They waited for their eyes to bulge out of their sockets. For their hearts to burst like meat balloons. For their heads to explode from the weight of their own existence. Nothing happened.

“Let’s get upstairs,” said Tom. “I hate this fucking basement.”

Greg turned the light out and closed the door leaving the body behind it and they filed up the stairs one by one. The coolness of the house felt soothing on their skin like human hands. Greg put the kettle on. They stood in the kitchen, didn’t speak, stared out into the dark garden, the dead streets beyond. Even the traffic was quiet. Over the cheap plastic kettle that struggled to boil they heard another knock. Two uncertain raps. Pause. Three more. Must have seen the lights still on. Jesus, wake up the whole fucking –

“Christ, what now?” Ezra switched the kettle off, as if it were only the rushing sound of its working element that alerted anyone to their house-wide wakefulness. It took seconds to shut up. Wearily assured of its own failure. More knocking. Not the fucking neighbour again.

“Fuck,” said Greg.

He left the kitchen and walked to the front door. Closed the living room door shut on his way. No more fuck ups. He yanked it open. Tanya. Lucas and Tanya. Sister. Shitlivers. He recoiled slightly away from her. Momentary loss of composure. Took a look at her tits. Imagined his cock between them. It was happening quickly in imperceptible perversion. Harmless enough. Though perhaps imagining doing it – intercourse – with your victim’s big sister edges towards classic psychopathy or psychosexual crises or characteristic paraphilic depravity. They looked big under her shirt. She wasn’t that old. He knew it wasn’t the time but the stress made his loins move. In ripples like a dying fish left on a riverbank. Don’t think about that now. Think about this now. Dead landlord. Dead brother. Dead fucked. Her thighs were thick but her calves were tiny, like arms. Older women were the more receptive. Who told him that? His dad? Can’t have been. She would beg him to do it and he would and Lucas would be dead downstairs. They would feel the secrecy in their congress and her clitoris would swell unconsciously with her dead brother’s memory. He wanted it to feel like he shouldn’t be doing it. It did feel like that. It wasn’t the time. He thought of the basement.

“Tanya,” he said, loud enough for them to hear in the kitchen. Ezra’s cigarette dropped out of his mouth. They all felt grateful for the kettle’s silence. “Hi.” He was leaning on the open front door like a bad actor playing nonchalant. His body stopped Tanya from coming inside.

“Hi Greg.” She spoke enthusiastically. “I’m sorry to come round so late.”

“That’s okay, anytime is fine. Although it is pretty late and...”

“I just wondered if you guys had seen Lucas.”

Greg’s tight face dropped, hung slack like a slipper, like shabby old house clothes. He couldn’t hold onto the smile. He swallowed, painfully aware of the concrete scraping of his own laryngeal prominence.

“Lucas?” he said. Voice like a child beaten up.

“Lucas.”

“No,” he said. “I mean. No. Why would we have seen Lucas? It’s late.”

“It’s just he mentioned that he had to come over here to see you guys,” she said. She put her hands, more just her fingers, in her jean pockets. Kind of rocked on her heels. “He was supposed to be coming to ours afterwards. That was about seven hours ago. He isn’t answering his phone and we haven’t heard a thing from him and to be honest Greg I’m a bit concerned. Worried.” She tried to peer over Greg’s shoulder. It was a very subtle motion. He adjusted his position a fraction, like it was something natural and not a defensive response to stimuli. “So have you seen him?”

“Have I?” said Greg slowly. Contemplative. Excessively so. Makes him look guilty.

“It’s straightforward Greg. Has he been here?”

“Right. No. Definitely no.”

“No?”

“No. Final answer.” Tried to smile as he said it but his fragile joke imploded hard, swallowing its own cheap pop culture reference like a mouthful of dogshit, left pointlessly hollow in Tanya’s partly raised eyebrows.

“Okay,” she said. They looked at each other for seconds. Ten, fifteen. He kept his eyes off her chest. She leant quickly into him, so quick it was like violence out of the stillness, and she pulled him towards her by the t-shirt. Her eyes were manic, darted about like a blackbird’s. Her face was centimetres from his. She could smell the spoilt milk twang of his sweaty neck. He kept his eyes straight ahead but out of the corner of one he saw her tongue come out, extended past her teeth and lips. Thick wet muscle of tongue, flexible and strong. It came out – as if sentient – and licked the length of his cheek. An animal ritual. A papillae declaration of devastating significance. There was a promise in that tongued exchange. There was cognisance, comprehension. It was a statement. She knew. He felt hot breath from her nostrils blow against his spittle cheek. She licked him again, the flat width of her giant tongue pressed down against him. It hadn’t felt like this in fantasy, where she begged him to fuck her. This felt bad wrong, something he actually shouldn’t be doing and not just something that felt like he shouldn’t be doing it. He felt like food weighed up under the convincing musculature of her masticatory organ. He was too surprised to move. She had a hand on each of his shoulders and moved her mouth to his ear. “You’re dead.” She said it quietly. Spoke it like an elegy. Short and painful. An observation rather than a threat. Greg pushed her away from him but gently.

“What?” he said. He sounded afraid, his face lopsided with confusion.

“I said okay,” she said. All warm smile and sincere blinking. Her eyelids moved very slowly. Greg thought of Morse code. “It’s fine. I’m sure he’ll turn up. You know what Lucas is like.” She rolled her eyes like they were sharing an intimate joke. The life of Lucas. Lucas and his ways. A real fucking character. If eyes talk then hers said they shared it, her and Greg. Her eyes screamed the conversation, barked it from rooftops: they both had their Lucas secrets. He felt it on her tongue over his bald left cheek, over its average contours. Felt the knowledge. Poured out of him like taste. She could taste it on him. “Thanks Greg, I mean that.” Smile. Smile. “Have a good night.” She looked at her wristwatch. “Or a good day I suppose. I’ll see you around.”

She left. Greg put a hand to his cheek, still damp. He rubbed it dry. He felt insane. He felt like Dustin Hoffman, only this wasn’t a seduction. He went back to the kitchen. They were standing in a circle around a broken pint glass in the middle of the laminate floor. Greg looked at the pint glass and sighed.

“Shit,” he said.

“What was that?” said Ezra, hissed like a pantomime.

“It was nothing.”

“Was that Tanya?” said Jonathan.

“Yeah, but it was nothing,” said Greg.

“Nothing?” said Ezra. “How can that be nothing?”

“What did she want?” said Tom.

“She wondered if we’d seen Lucas.”

They all looked at each other. Colour-drained haggard faces aged decades in five hours. Joe was rubbing his veined eyes with the palms of both hands. They slurped like wet mud. He rubbed until he saw flashing lights.

“She knows,” said Conor.

“She doesn’t know. How could she know?” Ezra’s sentences had all become scathing accusations.

“You heard her. She knew he was supposed to be coming here.”

“But why would she suspect murder?”

“Maybe he’s that kind of man,” said Joe. Eyes closed.

“Shut up,” said Ezra.

“How did she look?” said Jonathan.

“What does that mean?” said Greg.

“Suspicious? Angry?”

“She looked fine. As far as she’s concerned it’s fine.”

Greg felt limp in their gaze. He could still feel her tongue run up his cheek. Felt it on his buccal nerve like an orgasm. Imagined his thumb in her anus. He could still hear her say it: you’re dead.

“It doesn’t look fine,” said Tom.

“It’s fine.”

“Then why’s she coming here?”

“To see if her fucking brother was here,” said Greg. He moved his arms like inconveniences. “He wasn’t. Isn’t. I told her he wasn’t and she has no reason to think otherwise. Let’s keep it that way.”

“This is the beginning of the end,” said Tom. “First the neighbour, then Tanya, then the police. People are going to be looking for him and this is one of the first places they’re going to look. He was supposed to be coming here, for fuck’s sake. He told his sister he was coming here. His fucking body’s in the basement. His blood’s all over the carpet. The neighbour heard screaming. How the fuck do we think we’re going to get away with this? It’s murder.”

“People get away with worse things than murder and we’ll get away with this,” said Ezra. “We just need to be smart about it. And I admit, we can’t have this happening every day. We need to get it out of here.”

“We will,” said Jonathan. “We just need a couple of days to sort things out.”

“A couple of days might be just what we don’t have.”

“This is a big thing,” said Conor. Monotone assertions were his trademark. “Getting away with it’s not our only worry. We need to live with it. For our whole lives.” He tapped his temple with his index finger. “It’ll get us in here.”

“Please,” said Greg, picking up a glass from the worktop and smelling it. He filled it with water from the tap. “Let’s not do this now. I need to sleep. We all need to sleep. And can somebody please clear this fucking glass up.”

The words felt futile passing his lips. He left the kitchen, Joe followed him.

“Goodnight,” said Jonathan. He went.

Ezra filled a mug with water. It was ringed at the bottom with thick tea stains and chipped around the lip. He swallowed a gulp. Didn’t take his eyes off of Tom and Conor.

“We’ve fucked up,” he said. Tom nodded a reluctant agreement. “Night.” He went.

Tom turned the kettle on and lit a cigarette.

“How the hell are we supposed to sleep?” he said, “We need to get cleaned up in here. We need to...”

“Goodnight man,” said Conor. He put his hand on Tom’s shoulder. Just for a second. Then went into the back bedroom and closed the door.

Tom poured some instant coffee into a cup, poured water over that. The smoke from the cigarette looked like you could hold onto it. The sun was coming up.

the tenancy agreement: chapter 8

2010-08-21T13:42:00.001+01:00

2005

November

They were sat on chairs around the body, flecks and spatters of blood like ink on their hands and arms and clothes, all over the carpet, already drying in, their own sweat evaporating on their skin. The cool of it felt intrusive in the heat of the room, left them racked with all the emptiness of a one night stand, eyes turned upwards to the secular ceiling, their silent drunk prayers screamed unheard to no one. Someone had pulled a rug over the body and left a human shaped mound piled in the centre of the room. Like last days prophesy there were pools of blood fingers deep in the creases of the rug. Tom shook his head, his movements quick and spasmodic.

“Fuck, we need to get that thing out of here,” he said. He inhaled hard through his nostrils. “I can smell it.”

“It doesn’t smell yet,” said Greg, cold behind the eyes. “It hasn’t been dead long enough.”

“It does, and I can smell it.” Voice pitched with hysteria. “And then the neighbours will smell it. Fuck. I can smell it. We need to get it out of here now.”

“Will you calm down?” said Jonathan.

“He’s right,” said Greg. “We need to do this properly.”

They had been friends for what seemed like forever.

Tom looked at the blood on his hands and rubbed it onto the thighs of his jeans. It left red stained smears on his fingers like he had been chopping beetroot or pomegranate. An indelible reminder, a verbose witness, a scarlet letter.

“Properly?” said Conor. “What do any of us know about properly? I mean properly dealing with a dead body?”

Tom stood up, scratching the side of his head.

“We need to get the fucking thing out of here, that’s what we need to do,” he said.

“Well perhaps if you hadn’t killed him he wouldn’t be in here in the first place,” said Ezra, his only white shirt ruined. They used to drive parents’ cars all night and scream on the streets. Once Joe got over the counter ether from a French pharmacy and they took it all night and woke up on the floor smelling of hospitals. They must have been different people. Committing the pubic hair of every girl they ever fucked to memory as though it were the exact information that would save them.

“Me?” said Tom. “It was Joe that killed him.” Joe’s eyes were red rimmed but the tears – instinctive tears – were gone, his shirt unbuttoned to halfway down his abdomen. He still felt the coke in his heartbeat, his dry mouth, and he spurned culpability. He felt himself majestic. Far outside the wrongs of the world he happened without it. There was a lifetime between them. “Why the fuck did you kill him Joe?”

“I seem to remember you kicking him in the face,” said Joe.

“But you finished him.” All good narratives need an antagonist. “He was still alive.”

“Someone had to finish him” – Joe’s mouth moved as though behind strobe lights – “the way you fucked it up.”

“Please shut up and get it out of here.” Tom was shouting. Guilt hits everybody different. So does the need for self-preservation.

“Both of you need to shut up,” said Jonathan. “We all did this, we did it together. You too Ezra. It’s a mess we all need to take responsibility for.”

Ezra sneered as he smoked. The room was quiet. They could hear the blood.

“I can smell it,” said Tom eventually.

“Shut up,” said Ezra.

“We’ve got to get him out.”

“Where to exactly?” said Greg. He had stood up too, all the better to point. “The shops? The park? Where? Where the fuck are we supposed to take it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then shut up until you’ve got a useful suggestion. Jonathan. What do you think?”

“Honestly? I don’t know.”

“Oh God,” said Ezra, groaning with impatience.

“Oh God nothing,” said Greg. “We’re not just dumping a piece of rubbish. None of us know what to do here.”

“Maybe we should call the police?” said Conor.

The terrible stillness of the body was the worst thing. Nothing was ever that still. It was oppressive like a supercell. It left the room taut with unspoken expectation. Tom thought back to the party. Remembered the sand dry cunt of the friend he couldn’t get hard enough to fuck. Remembered the squat block of dark hair that sang with promise and pointed like an arrow like a command, pointed down to large fleshy labia like strips of meat. His teeth had chattered from pills and he dropped cigarette ash into his chest hair. He got her to jerk off while he watched. The sun coming up through the curtains that didn’t fit across the windows lit her discomfort like a beacon. They lay down next to each other but inches apart. Sexual failure on flannel sheets. Now there was blood on the floor. Now there was a body under the rug. Why was it so still? Death the logistical nightmare.

“And say what?” said Greg. “’Sorry officer – got a bit carried away at a house party and smashed our landlords head in. No harm done.’ That’s bullshit. This” – he pointed at the rug, at the typewriter – “is way past the police.”

“The police’ll have us,” said Tom. He spoke it in a whisper, in visions of pubis, acutely aware of the inappropriateness of his own reminiscences.

“This has got to stay between us,” said Jonathan.

“You know I can’t condone lies. Morally speaking.” Ezra had studied ethics at school, and was doing it again at university. Thought it gave him a real kind of moral superiority, despite having had at least one adulterous tryst that he didn’t like to talk about. He fixated on honesty because he thought his girlfriend was cheating on him. They all looked at him, disbelief wrung on their faces like smallpox. “Unless they benefit me, of course,” he said, smirking.

“Right,” said Greg. “So now what?”

“Could just stick it in the basement,” said Joe, matter-of-factly. He was picking at his long fingernails.

“Ha,” said Ezra, pronouncing it as a word and not a sound. He was that kind of a person. “That is the most stupid, absurd thing I have ever heard you say. Even out of the countless stupid and absurd things you’ve said in the past.”

But it was an idea. It had that much going for it.

the tenancy agreement: chapter 7

2010-08-17T17:51:00.002+01:00

2005

November

Music was blaring out of the open windows and into the London street, flecked with shouted voices engaged in mostly mundane conversation, even routine small talk – meal cooking! alt. music trivia! drunk film theory! narc haze responses to evolutionary biology! – amplified to primal to be heard over the speakers. The noise engulfed the terrace – it bathed in it, swamped by its staccato sentences, its throwaway expletives, its certain sense of its own rightness. The knock at the door was drowned in it, but knocked again. The music didn’t stop but there was a near unnoticeable twitch of the net curtains in the front window. The same knock hit one of the glass panels of the front door another time, three raps one-two-THREE, struck hard at the endpoint, which shook the weak door in its frame, rattling like the cheap plastic it was. Greg pulled the door open. It was Lucas, wheelchair and all. He had a likeable face, level with the symmetry his body lacked, all tan and blonde and cheekbones, an athlete’s face, eyes blue like memory, a face betrayed by his injuries, his paraplegia, his bulbous stomach left distended in its stasis, his arms like a paradox, their stick thin forearms poked like the limbs of a snowman into thick strong upper, muscled by the wheelchair, his dead legs hung like anomalies beneath him, a perpetual reminder of all he had lost. He wore black leather fingerless gloves to stop the friction of the rubber tread of the chair wheel from cutting his palms up, but they made his hands look intimidating, like a terrible secret he had to keep from the world, or deformed, like pincers, some of his dexterity lost with his legs.

“Lucas,” said Greg.

“Come on come on,” said Lucas, wheeling himself past Greg and into the hall. “Into the house.”

Lucas wheeled himself towards the living room, trying to manoeuvre the chair past shoes and piles of coats. A beer can got snagged in the wheel and Greg helped him to reach it and get it out, his face dripping with silent apology. It was an awful moment. He got himself into the living room, winced at the music. Despite the volume there were only four guys, five with Greg. It wasn’t a party, they were just sipping at lager. Lucas wheeled himself to the stereo and turned it off, then over to the vacant armchair. He hoisted himself over to it, his legs dragged slightly behind him like an inconvenience, and shuffled into a regular position. Greg was still standing up in the doorway, noticed there were no seats left. He eyed the empty wheelchair and looked at Lucas.

“Do you mind if I...” he said, pointing at it. Lucas just looked at him, didn’t say a word, his smile gradually dispersing into his even face, slowly, like a balloon deflating. Greg sat down on the floor by the wheelchair and knocked a glass of red wine over. It sank into the cream carpet. Lucas watched. Greg watched. The other four watched. Greg moved a sheet of newspaper over the spillage. At least he hadn’t got the salt. There were dried scarlet salt piles all over the house, each a half-solution to an upset glass of cheap Italian, two for a fiver. If they were honest they had all expected this.

“Be quiet for God’s sake,” said Lucas, into the silence. No one said anything. He checked the room over, leaning forward in his chair because of the awkward layout of the furniture. It was a mess of food plates, overflowing ashtrays, encrusted teacups stained into permanence by endless cocktails of tannin and hard water, of piles of purposeless metal scraps and cardboard, retrieved from the street for reasons unknown. Joe collected things from the street. It was like a compulsion, an acceptable outlet for his chronic kleptomania. Days earlier he had brought back a huge brown cardboard cylinder as tall as the ceiling, which he had propped up like a load-bearing pillar just in front of the mantelpiece. He hadn’t said a word about why he had done it, and no one had asked, it just became another part of the room, appropriated into their ramshackle landscape, as unquestioned as the walls or the cornices. Although it looked absurd, those ten feet of unadorned cardboard, it was just left, a testament to laziness, to intoxication – London’s ugliest unnecessary pillar, a landmark of its own categorization. Lucas looked at it then like he’d been punched in the neck, even recoiled some at the impact of its inexplicability.

“What an awful house of people this has become,” he continued. He sounded disappointed. The silence felt physical, everyone too tense to move. “So. Why do you think I’m here?” Again: silence. “I said why do you think I’m here?”

“Lucas,” said Ezra, stubbing his cigarette out in a blue glass ashtray and holding up his other hand in some kind of pacifying gesture – he was a conscientious objector to life, set dead against good times – and edging his buttocks further forward on his armchair, closer to Lucas, as though – as though what? As though only then would the benefit of proximity be truly felt, in the closeness to his own long hair, his own certain gaze? “Please let us explain.”

“Ezra,” said Lucas, a pacifying gesture of his own, a silencing pacifying gesture, “I’ve appreciated your efforts with this place but for now, shut up. Shut up and tell me why I’m here.”

“I suppose,” started Ezra, not used to such frank dismissal. He studied philosophy, for God’s sake.

“Yes?”

“I suppose it’s something to do with the rent we owe you.”

“You suppose it’s something to do with the rent you owe me?” Lucas was shouting. His paraplegic athlete’s neck danced with tendons, his face the claret of apocalypse seas. “That sixteen-hundred pounds? There is that, yes.”

“Lucas,” said Tom, fingering his lighter. “I’m going to...”

“But that’s just money!” Lucas shouted over the unlikely declarations. “No big deal, not where friends are concerned, like us, eh, just a big old chunk of money, right boys? Lads? Fellas? Doesn’t mean much between good friends like us, does it now? And what’s money?” His shouting had reached some kind of level peak, a plateau of volume which made the room sound hollow, despite being full of stuff. “Hmm? What is money? Don’t answer me.” Then he was quieter. “It’s nothing, nothing much. But do you know what’s really starting to annoy me? To get on the tits of my Caribbean-style curry goat?” It was a reference to one of Lewisham’s signature dishes, a reference lost in the intimidating ferocity of his oratory. They just stared at him. Ezra’s lips were tightly puckered, reeling from the sarcasm. “It’s the constant string of complaints from your... bloody neighbours. Noise this, talking that, vomiting too loudly in the middle of the night the other. I’ve had it up to here!” He slapped his temple with his gloved palm. It sounded like slapping a wet swimming cap. “I took a chance on you lot because you seemed like fun guys, but you’ve let me down again and again, over and over.” He paused, a moment’s thought that felt like a lifetime. “I want you out.”

“You can’t just kick us out,” said Greg.

“I can. I am. This is my house.”

“You...” Greg shifted angrily on the floor. He knocked over an ashtray.

“Okay, okay,” said Jonathan, trying to calm Greg down. “Just give us some time to find something else.”

“Lucas,” said Greg again, checking his temper. “I admit it’s taken us a while to get used to being here, but the music can stop. We can stop the music. We have stopped it. Listen.” He cupped his hand to his ear. Skull face. “Stopped. And we’ll pay the rent. We like it here Lucas, and we respect you as a man who has achieved something, despite...”

“I don’t think any of you know a thing about respect. I want you out of here, out of here, out of here!”

There was a moment of stunned calm at Lucas’s almost childish outburst. Greg couldn’t help sniggering, which he stifled, sublimated into a derisive snort. Tension as thick as the cigarette smoke around it. Lucas’s mouth hung open from his anger, made him look like a stroke victim, and he was blinking a lot, all quiet except for his own heavy breathing. It was stalemate, nothing to be done but sit, wait, hope for the end.

The sound of the front door thrust open too hard shook the room to movement, the shit clatter of it hitting the wall, and Joe tore through the door, skipping and hopping into the room, with huge manic eyes, sniffing scores of little sniffs. Been at the coke. He bounded with weird energy, buzzing his cock off, felt that serotonin kiss right down to his meticulous perineum, whooped with the rush, his head jerking around the four corners of the room like a territorial animal. He had a half-drunk litre bottle of Spanish lager in one hand, tight sweat rings under his arms, the only human link to the soulless mass production of his designer shirt. He saw Lucas in the armchair, his face an impressionist portrait of disgust and propriety, and instead of curbing his mania, bringing himself down, something snapped in him, clicked into life with all the bad decision making the narcotic would allow him, which was a shitload. He threw the beer bottle at the wall over Lucas’s head, rained glass and tepid beer over the furniture, and in a fucked instinct hardwired deep inside his coked neurons – an instinct borne of some imaginary hallucinated delirious genetic heritage – he grabbed the nearest thing to hand, an old portable Olivetti typewriter, weighed a bunch, and smashed it down onto Lucas’s head without a word, without even a thought, as if it was just what was done, what had to be done, and he knew it, he fucking knew it, fucking Joe, Big Joe, he fucking knew. A jet of blood arced out of Lucas’s split head and he let out a scream, basal, from somewhere ugly and afraid. The primordial bellow. Joe’s features took sharp turns, twisting and twitching with the coke, and his cheeks and mouth looked rubbery, like a Halloween mask, a latex simulacra, and in that chemical truth without the smokescreen of daylight he looked cruel and wrong. Lucas shut up and slid from the armchair, onto the carpet, onto the newspaper that Greg had laid down over the spilt wine, and there with limp legs he convulsed a bit, a reflex or something, but out cold.

“Joe!” Tom and Ezra shouted it together.

Greg was on his feet and pulled Joe back, away from their unconscious landlord, gripping his arms tight.

“What the fuck are you doing?” he snapped into Joe’s ear.

Lucas came round a bit, churning hoarse groans out like a dying bull, gloved hands clutching at themselves, reaching out for help that wasn’t going to come. Joe dropped the typewriter on the floor, its typebars entangled but still in one piece, as indestructible as cockroaches. His malevolent angles had been replaced by a look of complete confusion and his eyes welled with tears. He didn’t know what the fuck he had done, what the fuck he was doing. Big Joe. Lost in his own desert of Self. Solipsism today. Fuck. His self-centred night time universe seared straight through real-life. Big Joe. Cocaine Joe. Jesus Fucking Kennedy. Jesus Henry Christ. He pulled a wrap of coke from his pocket, which Greg snatched and threw to the side.

“Oh shit,” said Joe. “Oh shit. What have I done?”?

They all looked at Lucas, desperately in need of some high-end medical intervention, and were all too afraid to try to help him or to even kneel down by him, poor fucker.

“You’ve just caved our fucking landlord’s head in!” shouted Ezra. “How the fuck are you going to explain this?”

“Tom, what are we going to do?” said Greg, the pitch of his voice risen to panic. “What are we going to do? Jonathan? Anyone have any fucking idea what to do about this? Lucas? Lucas, are you okay?”

“Is he okay?” Ezra. Sarcastic. “Is he okay? He’s just had a typewriter smashed into his head. I doubt if he’s feeling very okay. Is he okay? Jesus. He’s running the fucking marathon.”

“Joe you’re a fucking shithead,” said Tom, meaning it. Joe was wiping tears from his eyes.

“Hey fuck you. You said you wanted to kill him. You all said it.”

“But I didn’t mean it. I didn’t actually... I wouldn’t have done it.”

“But what if you had?” It was Joe’s logic that suffered the most from the coke.

“But-fucking-nothing you ignorant bastard. I didn’t. You fucking did.”

Lucas had stuffed a hand into the pockets of his oversized khakis, grey comfort wear, and pulled out a mobile phone, his grim fingers fumbling at the buttons, trying to dial a number. Only three digits in 999. Even a cripple could do it. Maybe he had it on speed dial. Lack of coordination slowed him down.

“He’s going for his phone,” said Conor.

Tom jumped forward and kicked Lucas in the head – must have been an instinct as well. Self-preservation this time. Sand coloured desert boot toe snapped the head back. Lucas grabbed at Tom’s ankles, half appealing for help and half trying to pull him over; off-balance, Tom screamed out and started desperately stamping on his face, apologising after every stamp, and they could all hear it cracking under the soft soles of his feet like hammered coconut or eggshell, his face a swollen horrible mess shitting blood but still very much alive with these violent soundscapes of dramatic destructive gastronomy. His hands were still clasped onto Tom’s ankles.

“What shall I do?” said Tom. He was sweating into his v-neck.

They didn’t know what else to do and so all joined in, those six, all punching, kicking, prying, spitting, stamping, smashing, cracking, doing everything they could to shut the bastard up, to make the whole fucking mess go away. Now they had to kill him. Fucking sonofabitch. The neighbours would love to have dying wails to add to their list of INAPPROPRIATE noise use, sandwiched clean between jubilant laughter and night time vomiting. Police would love to get a load of it: student-coke-romp-typewriter-head-cave-in-horror: “is this what we pay our taxes for?” pleads crying convenience store supervisor. Screams became wheezes then gurgles in the downpour of fast raining blows. Shut the fucker up. Panic can push anyone into terrible mistakes, split second decisions that can change a life. Six lives. He had to fucking die. For all of their sakes.

But Lucas was still moving, still breathing occasional blood bubble breaths, still blinking near-dead eyes with the negligible remains of eyelids.

“Jesus,” said Greg, panting, nearly in tears. “Why won’t he die?”

Joe’s eyes darted around the room. “Don’t worry,” he said, and ran to the mantelpiece, picked up this hunting knife he liked to carry around. He knelt down at Lucas’s head and looked up at the others. Greg nodded. Joe held Lucas’s brow still with one hand and pulled the knife slowly across his throat. They were swamped in blood, Lucas was choking on it, even that seemed to take a lifetime, Lucas was dead.

Silence again. Neighbour-friendly conscientious silence. Sporadic deep breaths. Panting. They looked at each other. They looked at Lucas. At least the blood hid the wine stain.

the tenancy agreement: chapter 6

2010-08-13T18:49:00.003+01:00

1974

November

Exhausted, Lucas is asleep, entwined around his sister on a bare single mattress, stuck together like a single person, hiding their victim souls behind skinny limbs and bruises, behind eyelids too determined to keep up. Their skin is crusted with dirt, mottled like tiger pattern, like poorly applied tanning sauce, flecked with the alt brown of dried blood rich against the cracking dust lines. Across the room their mother sits, her hollow eyes locked vacant in space, her body so still like an artefact, a Vesuvian unearthing, life sucked out of this inadequate shell, this paean to the tangible earth, and leaving only the unmoving, the burnt out tissues behind, statued on the ancient furniture. The silence beats an oppressive rhythm, fizzing into its own existence, the unimaginable orchestra of particles and molecules and atoms blaring their noiseless movements, like dust mites and hair bits and the sound of the turning earth creaking, the skirting boards groaning into life. Burst by hoarse laughter the door opens up. Mother doesn’t move a fraction. Lucas and Tanya still asleep. Dad and his pub friend, reeling slightly on their feet, they reek of pints – of best – and chasers, house scotch, the shit stuff. The local’s over the road – The Rising Sun, a wallpapered den of barely concealed violence, a pivotal point in some cycle of hate, its beer pumps and optics perpetually reinforcing the decay, the breakdown, the permanence of it all, this horror, its fixed misery dripping off the walls like damp, the bright electric light bulbs bringing every vein and scar and memory vividly to life. Every day the same punters, same handful of domestic abusers, consoling each other for their busted knuckles, idolising each other for their tales each more grotesque – and true – than the last. Like veterans of an ageless war against familial responsibility and tender feeling they bond tightly among the dart boards and ashtrays, finding approval and justification both in the gammon face of the landlord; they virulently condone each other’s cruelty, baptise themselves in booze and bar snacks, apostles of their own patriarchal church of unchecked testosterone. Every day the same two women peddling their very genitals for loose change, done up quickly, thickly, the buttery make-up not hiding their screams so loud inside, their fleshy thighs mottled with cellulite tributaries, nails smoke yellow, dry hand-jobs conducted on bar stools (landlord doesn’t mind – he WATCHES), blow jobs in toilet cubicles – or a fiver a fuck but the car park for that, standing pressed up against the wire fence, hammered joylessly with the breathy violence that breeds in these men’s homes, left with knickers round knees picking coins – all silver – off the floor in the weak light from the frosted toilet window, and they’re laughing about it in the pub, and another one’ll be out in a minute for his turn, wipe yourself up and start over.

Dad ignores mother, rubs his hand together, stops in his tracks when he sees the kids. His hands stop rubbing, his face turns, his mate – say Steve – is grinning, gormless, everything about his presence just a lewd blot, pulsing with crude sexualized gesture – unfiltered by the acceptable, the decent.

“What the fuck is this?” says Dad, his arms by his sides like ornaments, fists clenched at the bottom of them.

“Better not be her,” says Steve through a sighed belch, revelling in his own recycled beer stench. “Tol’ me she were young – s’how I want her. Not like this fackin mess.”

Snapped: “Does that look like my fucking daughter?”

“Thass it then?” he says, gesturing to the mattress with a perceptible grind of his pelvis. “Tell me thass it. I’ll ‘ave a slice a that.” His face contorts in the delight of potential intercourse. Dad is looking at the mattress, the sleeping kids, features angry, eyes distracted.

“Show me the money first you filthy bastard.”

Steve pulls a scrunched five pound note out from his grimy jeans, the denim torn below the pockets, the blue-white of their insides hanging out over the leg. He holds it up so Dad can see it but doesn’t hand it over.

“Thass it,” he says again, smiling like a shit. He’d done some time for sex offences but carried on all the same. Women didn’t get his sense of humour. The blokes in the pub called him Injunction Steve. He was always the last to fuck the pub hooker, felt the sperm of five other men drip down his balls while she impatiently coaxed him along to finish. When he closed his eyes he saw disembodied vaginas – no respite – depersonalized female genitals, parts otherwise absent from the whole, just endless vulvas without the need for consent, conversation, apology. His perceptual inability to humanise female sex organs made him dangerous long before ViSOR and Injunction Steve was a free man. The more things change the more they stay the same. “Sweet little cunt,” he goes on. “Taste like sugar. You’ve had a taste? Tell me it tastes sweet.”

“She’s my daughter.”

“You dirty bastard, you ‘ave. Don’t blame you, neither. Lovely thing like that – I’d fuck it if it was me own grandchild.”

“Didn’t I tell you to show me the money?” Dad is still looking at the mattress, his face purpling up, neck all tendon and stretched skin.

“I shown you the money, five sheets, right here.” He holds the note up like the grail. “It’s yours. And you can watch if you like.” He’s idly thumbing the end of his dick through his jeans.

“Five.” He still hasn’t turned to see the money, hasn’t moved.

“This is alright, is it? You don’t mind?”

“What?” says Dad, shaking his head from his reverie, looking at Steve. Mother’s just sat there. Always is. “No.” Her eyes point onwards but she doesn’t see a thing. “Give me that money.” He takes the fiver and pockets it.

“Righto. You gonna wake it up then?”

“Yeah.”

“Who’s that it’s with then? Boyfriend?”

“No.” Frowning like his face will cave in. “Brother.”

“Her brother?” Steve’s laughing in pub tones, overplayed disbelief. “Fuck me, what kinda house is this? Brothers fackin sisters? Jesus wept. You wanna keep an eye on them two mate. They’ll be growing up like a couple a them perverts, keep on fackin each other like this.”

“You what?” His dead voice pierces the life of Steve’s oratory. Injunction Steve. Oblivious Steve.

“They’re at it – right under your fackin nose. In your house. Broad fackin daylight. Yeah, you wanna watch it alright mate. Knock it right on the ‘ead.”

Dad’s face twitches a bit. Joke’d a been fine in the pub but not here. Not in his house. His red face is so red it looks like paint against his moon-white chest. Best of British.

“Perverts,” says Steve in a conspiratorial half-whisper, dumbly relishing his little fuckabout.

Quick smart Dad yanks Steve forward by one shoulder and throws a fist into the middle of his face. Bone pops and he lumbers backwards.

“Get the fuck out of my house,” Dad says.

“You mad cunt you broke my – “

Dad hit him again, kicked him when he hit the floor, pulls him back up to his feet and drags him out of the room. He pulls the front door open.

“Filthy sonofabitch,” says Bloodyface Steve, Injunction Steve. “I know what you are.”

“Get out.”

“Least I do it to other people’s daughters.”

“Get. Out.”

“What about my money?”

Dad slams the cheap door to rattling. It’s woken up Tanya and Lucas, their eyes locked tight frightened in recognition, bodies frozen to the mattress by the inevitable. Dad’s footsteps are rushing back to the room and his shoulder drunkenly reels into the doorframe as he tries to get through it.

“Y’bastards.” He growls the words out in one drawn out syllable, like his tongue’s been slashed.

He rushes over to the mattress and grabs Lucas, Tanya screaming for him to stop it, and pulls him up off the floor, cut arms pinned by his sides. The boy can only kick his legs. The futility of it makes him want to scream. Tanya is punching Dad in the back but he doesn’t let go.

“What do you think you were doing to her?” he shouts in Lucas’s ear, his breath like hot poison condensing against his face. “You don’t fucking touch her.”

“I didn’t. We were just sleeping.” Resigned to the certain destiny of the present. No pleading, no apology. It was all already happening.

“Don’t you tell me what you were doing.”

“I wasn’t, I was...”

“You’re perverts. Perverts showing me up.”

Tanya’s still punching him, although too weak to hit him hard. She feels like a kid. Under her limp fists his back is like something out of an abattoir, just a fleshy memorial – ancient! forgotten! – to his own distant humanity, linked only in genes, and form, and bone structure, and muscle definition, only in the most physical ways. Not a man by any other account. Not alive. Being. He was, nothing more – with all the meaninglessness that went with it.

“Put him down,” she screams.

Mother is rocking slightly, back and forth, metronomic, counting time with the dull beat of Tanya’s fists, her eyes unmoving and fixed blind in their sockets, face caught in a weird grin that might just be a muscle reflex. Dad is trembling with rage.

“You don’t fucking touch her,” he says. “You need to learn some manners. Some respect.”

“I didn’t touch her.”

“Don’t you hurt him,” says Tanya, her dark hair plastered to her forehead in sweaty strands. Her voice is weary too, accepting. She accepted what she knew would come.

“You’re both disgusting, the pair of you. Pair of fucking animals. You enjoy it did you?” He shakes Lucas like a doll, snapping his neck back. “Putting it in her? Enjoy it?”

“I didn’t put it in her.”

“Fucking liar! Did you enjoy it?”

“I didn’t...”

“Didn’t think so. Isn’t much fucking good for nothing is she. Dry like a desert, little slut, fucking whore, bitch cunt.” He’s crying and pouring sweat. “Dishing herself out like she’s a fucking public convenience.”

Tanya jumps a foot or so off the ground and punches her father in the back of the head, which stops his tirade short and leaves the room hollow with the empty silence of domesticity, punctuated only by mothers rocking. The room aches with it. Dad smiles at Lucas. There’s blood on his teeth. Must have bit his tongue when she punched him. Without even looking at her he swings Lucas’s whole body into the sharp corner of the wall which protrudes out for the fireplace, the very house conspiring against them – a double-fronted accessory to violence, revelling in its collusion, the awful finality of its assaultive involvement. Then crack, or snap like a piece of wood. His spine takes the force of the collision. Inside he screams thunder but nothing leaves his lips. Dad let’s go and he falls face down to the carpet and feels nothing but his brain. Why does he feel nothing? Brain keeps asking, like a deranged quizmaster. Dad swings his fist behind him and hits Tanya’s face hard, hits her over. She feels a tooth loose.

“Tanya,” says Lucas. “I can’t move. Oh Jesus. I can’t feel anything.”

“It’ll be okay,” she says.

“Why won’t my brain shut up?”

Dad picks a small length of wood up from the floor, piled with other rubbish. Tanya rushes out of the door.

“You need discipline,” says Dad. He’s standing over Lucas, whose brain keeps feeling. Why my brain why my brain? Dad swings the wood down onto Lucas’s back, six seven nine times, laughing too. Lucas watches the wood hit his flesh but doesn’t feel it. Feels nothing. Just his brain. Like a spectator. Like he’s left his body behind. Like one of those out of body experiences. He realises he is screaming, seconds after he does it, but it’s because it’s so odd. He can’t feel anything. Nothing.

Dad doesn’t hear Tanya come back into the living room. Why would he, engrossed, spent, drained like he shot his load, looking down at Lucas with triumph drawn all over his face, drawn right into its lines and wrinkles? Doesn’t hear her footsteps over his own deep breaths. She’s carrying a long Phillips head screwdriver. Sticks it into his back, in right up to the yellow plastic handle. His face contorts with it, agonized rubber, she thinks. She pulls it back out slowly. He clutches at his stomach ineffectually and turns slowly around, blood on his lips. Lucas looks up at them, his eyes don’t blink, he doesn’t speak a word. Mother rocks some. The wound is bleeding heavily, bits of flesh or something are stuck to the tip of the screwdriver, and he drops the wood and tries to put his hand on it. Compress! He lunges at Tanya and she sticks him again, in the chest, sounds like slicing meat as it goes through, grinding on a rib. Fucking pork. He goes down like a felled tree, nothing big or impressive. The tumble is an anticlimax after sixteen years, she thinks. More blood out of his mouth but he’s still trying to kick his legs and flap his arms. She sits slowly on his chest, her thighs restraining his weakened arms, and she stabs him in a frenzy, over and over, tens of tens of times, through the chest, the gut, completely silent as she does it. Mother starts rocking faster with the tempo of the stabbing. Lucas looks on, acutely aware of his brain, that he can feel his brain. That’s not normal, he thinks. Dad’s breathing is whistling through fucked pipes, Tanya’s hands are dripping with his blood. She lifts the screwdriver over her head and drives it into his neck. It crunches through his windpipe like teeth through breakfast cereal. There’s a lot of blood, red with certainty.

Tanya gets up without a word and leaves the room again. Lucas is still. Mother’s stopped rocking and is gazing at nothing. Tanya comes back – holding a claw hammer, slender metal. She stands in front of her mother’s chair, puts a hand on her cheek.

“Mum,” she says. “Look at me, mum.” The cheek is cold under her bloody hand. Mother’s eyes don’t move. She doesn’t speak. “Mum,” says Tanya again. “Just fucking look at me.” She doesn’t. Tanya looks at Dad’s body and feels peace. She looks at Lucas and knows he is paralysed. Paraplegic. She looks at the hammer in her hand. She rests the flat side of the hammer’s head against the peak of mother’s brow, lines it up, ever the perfectionist, then lifts it to arm’s length and cracks it down heavy into the centre of her head. Mother falls off of the chair to the right and Tanya starts a little, starts at this or any other life ending so much more quickly than it could ever begin, starts at the sound of skull-bone cracking. Eggshell, eggshell, eggshell. She lays the hammer down by the body and goes over to Lucas.

“I can’t feel myself,” he says. She strokes his hair and comforts him, dark red streaks left down the side of his face like war paint. She kisses his cheek, then they kiss again, each other, with mouths, two mouths, heads spinning, properly kissing, mouth on mouth, multi-lipped, his and hers, passionately – is this what passion feels like? like a massive relief? – like out of the cinema, like the lovers they never were. She rolls him onto his back and he flops over, his body flaccid and malleable, stripped of feeling, and she rubs her hand over the lifeless crotch – injustice itself speaks through the eternally static genital of the paralysed youth – of his jeans, sits straddling him, kids older than their years, kisses him again on the mouth, moves her hand up his chest.

“I can’t feel anything,” he says.

“I know.” She whispers it for fear of disturbing the strange intimacy. He has bloody handprints on the chest she kisses from neck to waistband.

the tenancy agreement: chapter 5

2010-08-10T18:23:00.002+01:00

2005

October

Greg dropped the needle down. Bowie’s ‘Heroes’. Fripp’s guitar was loud, majestic in the dull morning. A huge canvas was half-propped up against the wall and torn down the middle. They had taken a knife to it the night before in a drunken bacchanal, showered it with ceremonial lager and destroyed it, kicked in the frame and shredded the painting. They assured themselves it was the death of art by mass participation. Conceptually astute, it had represented the climax of a hideous night, teeming with the violence of their collaborative futility in the face of the finite world. They wanted to change something, but no one of them knew what. Call it some shit fight for their own real experience! Shared and alone! They talk in paradox! A stilted party that never got started, its guests had all been possessed within the walls, burning with the rage of meaning. Earlier in the night Tom had been cajoled drunk into demonstrating his favourite sex positions on the people in the room, not actually locking with them in communal spectator congress for hypothetical appraisal but – for informational purposes – holding them where he’d hold them and thrusting at them where he’d thrust at them, his cock left limp in its pants from the coke and looking into their six dark eyes with the palpable tension of all of those genitals that fit together. There was Joe and a female guest and Ezra’s girlfriend, a short rich girl of Jewish heritage with a small head and hair long to her buttocks. Tom had swapped clothes with her, and stretched into stockings and skirt he got her on all fours and held her hips and pushed himself against her arse and her cunt that was covered by his own Levis, and she looked back at him over her shoulder while he did it. It was missionary with Joe and cowgirl with the other girl, the coke numbing the humiliation and turning it into a bizarre kind of attentiveness, or gravity, like the whole affair was in some way a crucial experiment. The weird energy all fed into this unspoken Situationist bacchanal, which unfolded with resigned inevitability and left them spent and empty like orgasm, hoarse-voiced and sweating to Elgar. It was hard to tell if they had gone too far when they were all so fucked. Besides that: never regret revelry. Joe had painted it above the front door like scripture, like a consensual group maxim. Greg walked away from the stereo in a blue dressing gown, worn down to almost nothing in all the key places. He knocked over a half full beer can and left it spilling on the carpet.

Ezra was spread out on the sofa, which had been broken during the night. Greg had jumped on it and the weak wooden frame crunched to the floor like a haemorrhage of cheap furniture stuffing and spring parts and ripped blue fabric. It had left one seat about twelve inches lower down than the other two seats, and Ezra’s head was at that end, lower than his legs, and he was completely still apart from occasional, very slow and considered blinks. Greg looked down at him and smiled like he was going to puke, clutching a mug of tea that he couldn’t bear to bring to his lips. He wandered out of the room and Ezra rubbed his eyes as Bowie got louder. A black woman of about thirty walked into the living room, frowning at the noise and carrying a brightly painted wooden octopus. She was wearing hot pink and a skirt so short that Ezra thought he imagined the shape of her vulva. Her tits moved under her smile that broadened when she saw Ezra.

“What are you doing?” he said.

“It’s okay,” she said. “He said I could have this if I left now.”

“It’s not his room,” Ezra snapped. “I told you that last night.”

“What?”

“It’s my room.”

“Okay. Can I still keep this?”

She held up the octopus. Her name was Yaa. “As in: Yaa,” she had clarified, when she had turned up late with Joe, another someone he had met just wandering around the streets. She talked about herself incessantly, as though by doing so she would be immortalised with a self-professed celebrity status that extended all around the Lewisham area. She often slipped into doing it in the third person, but no one was sure whether this was part of a constructed vapid affect informed by tabloid culture and celebrity idolatry, some attempt at self-aggrandisement, or whether it was simple grammatical inconsistency. She had sucked Joe off on the stairs down to the back garden even though he couldn’t come, and they were well suited in that respect. They wouldn’t have felt as though enough people had seen them, really seen them, had the act occurred within the privacy of a bedroom.

“No,” said Ezra firmly, gesturing to the door with a limp flick of the hand. “Now piss off out of this house that isn’t yours.”

Yaa placed the octopus down on the table amidst the cans.

“Read it yeah,” she said to Ezra, giving him the finger. “Yaa knows you’re a motherfucker.” She turned around and left. Ezra heard the front door opening and closing.

“Fuck’s sake,” he said and rolled off the sofa.

*

Later all six of them were sitting in the living room, which hadn’t been cleaned up. Someone had bought more beers, and they sang heavenly in plain blue carrier bags, the polythene stuck to the cool condensation of the aluminium cans. They were listening to Suicide, turned up loud.

“Any complaints last night?” said Ezra.

“Of course,” said Jonathan, lighting a joint. “I stopped counting after the third. There’s not much is going to make her happy.”

“I’m starting to think she doesn’t really like us,” said Tom. “What’s her name?”

“Yasmin,” said Ezra.

“Jewish?”

Ezra nodded. He had tried to make friends with her, or at least pacify her, the day before the party. He took her bottle of wine and told her about the party and that his girlfriend was Jewish too, but she had threatened to call the police. He had sounded odd. Joe grabbed another beer from the bag.

“Great party, though,” he said.

“Yeah, great party,” snapped Greg, loudly breathing out smoke through tightly pursed lips. “Except fucking Lucas is going to give us some serious shit if she starts emailing him again. He doesn’t need it and we don’t need it. She emails him again and it’s us who gets the ball end of Lucas. He already told us: final final warning. And that was last time.”

“Fuck him, Greg. He’s just lonely,” said Joe.

“He owns the house, Joe,” said Ezra.

“It’s just a house. Who gives a shit?”

“I do,” said Tom. “I live here, all my stuff is here. We’ve got to not fuck this up.”

“I tried to remind you of that yesterday while your eyes rolled back in your head and you danced to ‘Common People’ on your now broken bed with half the fucking party.” Ezra hadn’t seen him in his girlfriend’s clothes, simulating fucking her from behind. Probably for the best.

“But that’s exactly it,” said Joe. “Fuck it. If he keeps on threatening us I’ll sort it out.”

“What are you going to do Joe? Get a fake passport for him? Sell him some coke? He’s well within his rights to kick us out already.” Ezra took a long swig on his can, a thin stream of the tepid lager trickling out the corner of his lips and down over his chin.

“I’ll sort it.”

“Don’t be a dickhead,” said Greg. “No one’s sorting out anything, least of all our fucking landlord.” Joe’s mind seemed to be wandering and he opened another beer, despite not having finished the last. Ezra shot a frown at Tom, who felt a bad taste in his mouth. “He can throw us out Joe.”

“Agreed,” said Jonathan, passing the joint to Greg and nodding at the stereo. “So shall we turn it down?”

They all smiled. Nobody moved. The music blasted onward.

the tenancy agreement: chapter 4

2010-08-08T10:27:00.004+01:00

2005

October

Greg had moved into the front bedroom, the biggest, because he'd been left with the box room in the previous house. It had always seemed to suit his rather Spartan lifestyle, but this time he insisted that he wanted to spread his stuff out, to feel his personality among the empty space and reclaimed furniture. He had pulled a tatty armchair up from the basement and was sitting on it seriously, flanked by Jonathan and Ezra. Joe was sitting on the bed, his eyes wandering around the peripheries of the room and his fingers drumming absentmindedly on the thighs of his blue jeans. The other three watched him like a TV, smoking cigarettes.

“Joe,” said Greg. “Are you listening?”

“What?” said Joe, shaking his head, like he was trying to wake up from a vision far more interesting than Greg’s moving mouthparts and sober tone. Greg had had an epiphany during the summer, the result of LSD and a middle aged South African man called Keith, who was into sodomy and conspiracies and played Terence McKenna recordings while smiling into his beard. During this epiphany he had felt the force of righteousness in his blood, had seen the right path, and like an acid evangelist he was keen to lead Joe – whose cocaine city lifestyle was antithetical to Greg’s half-hearted neo-hippy ethos – onto it. They were increasingly at odds, their aggressive disagreements borne entirely of narcotic influence. While Greg discriminated between psychedelics and stimulants, moulded their effects into his own interior value hierarchy, Joe made no such discrimination. He took anything and was still using coke, despite Greg’s insistence of empty promises. It had been a pretty heavy year for all of them.

“Joe?” he said.

“I’m listening,” said Joe.

“You have to pay rent, okay?” Greg looked at him with disappointment in his eyes, paternalized by his drug experiences. “I don’t know if you realise that, but that’s how we get to live here, we pay rent. It’s about respect. You have to respect us because you’re sharing this house with us.”

“Fuck you, Greg.”

Greg stood up fast and knocked the armchair backwards; its wooden insides chimed against the radiator.

“Don’t tell me to fuck me.” He shouted the words like a chanted catchphrase from a strange TV gameshow. Then stormed from the bedroom, tugging the door hard behind him. It was hung badly in the jamb and scraped slowly along the carpet. Came to a stop before it slammed shut. The wood panelling secreted embarrassment. Smiling oblivious Joe looked at Ezra and Jonathan and shrugged. He pulled open one of Greg’s bedside drawers and took out a bag of weed and some papers and started to roll a joint.

*

Tom was in the kitchen, shaking his head at the mountain of washing up piled on the surfaces, stained mild yellow in patches by turmeric. Pans were charred with tarry burnt lentils and thin black spaghetti pasta stuck fast to their worn Teflon bases. Plates congealed with food scraps or lines of tasteless sauces, missed by the tongues that grimly licked the crockery clean, using body organs like bread to mop the juices. Cutlery was at a premium, all thick with bits. There were hundreds of dead wine bottles lined up like notches on a bedpost along the top of the kitchen cupboards, a proud public declaration of consumption. It had been left by the previous tenants and they had kept it as a green glass spectacle. Beer the stench that held the kitchen together, not wine or red hot dhal. Stale lager that was sticky on the floor, mounded tea towels left by the washing machine that had mopped spillage after spillage and sat unwashed, sodden with the drink. The whole house smelt like hangover in blue light caught coiled in the sun. Their own collection of empty beer cans – ring pulls twisted off and left rattling inside, flecked around the mouthpiece with cooked tobacco, the empty can reborn as a makeshift ashtray – engulfed the hob like a virus, a low-grade homage to the wine bottles above. He took the last clean glass from an empty cupboard, a shot glass really, and filled it with water from the tap, not even daring to look in the sink. Greg stormed into the room and he looked up.

“Fucking cunt,” said Greg.

“What?”

“Joe.”

“Right.”

“He told me to fuck me.”

“To fuck you?”

“Yeah.”

Greg pushed some of the washing up onto the floor. It landed noisily but didn’t break, just left a worse mess behind. It was frustrating for both of them. They both looked down at the pile and Tom winced. Sighing, Greg bent down and started picking the plates back up, one by one.

“This isn’t really about Joe,” he said.

“Then what is it about? It’s getting pretty fucking unbearable to live with.”

“I don’t know. Something feels wrong.”

“It always feels like that in a new house. You’ll get used to it.”

“No, it’s something else.”

“Fuck,” said Tom. “Like what?”

“I don’t know. It doesn’t make any sense. Something just feels wrong.”

“That’s what everyone says.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know. Visitors. Girls. Talking about the vibes of the house. They said the vibes were wrong.”

They looked at each other.

“Maybe it’s the vibes that stop Joe paying the rent,” said Tom.

“Yeah. We can remind him of the fucking vibes when we get thrown out.”

Tom snorted a reluctant laughed response.

“Fuck it,” Greg says. “Vibes. It’s bullshit.”

“Yeah,” said Tom. “Bullshit.”

Greg pulled himself up from the floor with the surface as a stabiliser and said shit, his fingers sunk in week-old mayonnaise. He dumped the washing up in the sink and didn’t turn the tap on, then wandered off. Tom refilled his glass, looked around the kitchen and lit a cigarette. What a shithouse. He turned on the hot tap and watched the water fall into the sink. The plug wasn’t in. It spiralled down, away into its own pointlessness.

the tenancy agreement: chapter 3

2010-08-06T18:24:00.002+01:00

1974

August

Lucas is bare-chested, gaunt like a mummified Audrey Hepburn, his button nose beaded with sweat beneath his uncut thick hair, ribs like road markings on his concave chest. He’s cut and bruised old and new, knife wounds centimetres deep and shiny cigarette burns and knuckle marks, his skin a twilight hue of purples, clarets, twisted green yellow sunsets. Swollen eyes from crying he can’t stop, he looks through the open bedroom door, heaving silently inside himself.

She is bound from the ceiling. His sister. Tanya. Long electrical flex tied through a metal ring and to her raw wrists cut bare to flesh by the friction and the pressure, the heels of her feet just reaching the floor. Her face has been badly battered and both eyes are swollen shut, popped like meat beneath the force of blows thrown repeated and methodical. She sobs drily and it sounds to Lucas like puking an empty stomach but worse. Left stripped from the waist down Lucas feels embarrassed at the sight of her pubic hair and wants to save her from it all but his chest is too thin and his arms are too weak and he can’t stop crying, fucking idiot, fucking idiot. He presses his nails hard into the back of his hand which turns white and then red when the skin breaks. White shirt dowsed blood red it clings like a wet t-shirt to her pregnant stomach – and she barely sixteen and never had a boyfriend, not a real one. Their father is pacing around the unfurnished room smoking cheap cigarettes erratically, his movements jerk like pairs of insect wings – a dragonfly! – and become nearly unnoticeable in the haze of the stifling room, his licked lips leave the butt end wet and flat, sodden together by his heavy draws. It’s always so hot. He punches Tanya again in the face and she moans a bit out of torn lips, then three more times quickly, like one movement. Won’t be long before her face gives in. She tries to recoil but doesn’t have the energy. It’s the hopelessness that makes Lucas cry more and he puts his hands over his eyes but peers through the bloody nail-bitten fingers. The humiliation nauseates. Dad brings the flat sole of his heavy boot into the centre of her stomach; she lurches backwards on the flex, its polymers squeaking like new trainers on the metal ring with the movement, and she screams but it sounds inhuman, he face so swollen that such glottal reflexive noises are the loudest she can make. Lucas runs into the room, grabs weakly at his father’s arm.

“Dad,” he says. “Please don’t.”

“What’s that?” he shouts, and shakes his arms free of Lucas’s grip. “You want to help her? Fuckin slut.”

“Please don’t hurt her again. She’s not a slut. She’s my sister. Please.”

“You want to help the little fucking slut?” He jabs Lucas in the face, the nose of constant breakage, which knocks him backwards and out the door. “Slut wants to get her own fucking daddy in shit, having his fucking babies.”

Tanya screams, a bit louder, but blood bubbles out with it.

“It hurts,” she says to a godless sky.

Lucas edges back towards the door frame, his eyes stinging from the punch. Was she in labour, forced into birth by the trauma, the hatred?

“Get the fuck out of here,” shouts dad.

*

Lucas runs down the stairs, his feet slip on the threadbare carpet. Into the living room, as bleak as the bedroom, a soul of shit. Three broken chairs line the walls, mouldy and peeling, the table an orange crate lined with drained beer cans and cigarette butts in a depraved symmetry, a skewed homage to Warhol’s surface.

“Mum,” says Lucas, running up to a woman who sits in a tatty armchair in the middle of the room, upholstery torn apart and spewing spring guts and flammable stuffing like a violent crime. She must only be in her forties but looks twenty years older, her skin greying and her eyes empty holes of irredeemable void, her face scarred if not bloody; she stares into space and her hands tremble as she brings a cigarette to her lips but doesn’t draw on it, just holds it, combusting. Dad is shouting at Tanya, his insults coming down the stairs, killers of their own.

“Mum,” says Lucas again, trying to rouse the fossil of familial past. “He’s going to kill her, mum. Please do something. He’s going to kill the baby mum. Please stop him.” He shakes her like a corpse but her gaze is fixed somewhere away from the earth. He wants to punch her, to make her feel what he feels, but he can’t do it. “Please come and help me.”

Lucas runs back up the stairs, about halfway, then back down and into the kitchen. He pulls a dirty knife from the dirty surface. There are maggots on dead meat hunks. The drifting dust given visual life in the filtered sunlight makes him feel claustrophobic. Tanya screams again. He hears the gurgles of a baby.

*

Dad looks around at Lucas, out of breath at the doorframe, his face taut with disgust, and pushes past him, a bloody heap of flesh clasped in his hands, half-wrapped in a ragged oily cloth. Two words are tattooed on his fingers. ‘Fuck Love’. The heap glistens fresh.

“Dad?” says Lucas. He stops in his tracks and looks at the boy, can’t stop himself from smiling.

“You want to see it? Your little brother?”

He thrusts the baby towards Lucas. It’s awful, a misshapen mess of flesh and underdeveloped bone fragments. He can see one lidless eye and stunted arms capped with anomalous fingers. A gurgling sound comes from its face, like a plughole draining. It’s trying to breathe, to cling on to its pointless short life. Lucas trembles so hard he thinks his heart will stop; he reaches a tentative hand towards the baby, and swears it reaches back. It doesn’t. He touches it with his fingers and the tissue pulses beneath his hand. A reflex thing. Dad laughs, pulls the window open, throws the baby out of it, gurgling as it falls.

Tanya is still hanging from the ceiling, her thin legs like chicken and covered with blood that’s piled on the floor at her feet. Lucas runs into her and tries to hug her, to untie the flex bound so tight around her wrists, but he can’t reach it, his hugs hurt her broken ribs. Behind him his father blocking the doorway.

“He didn’t make it,” said dad, grin spread across his shit face.

Lucas ran at him, knife clutched outwards like an extension of himself. Dad takes the knife and pushes Lucas hard into the wall. He gets up, runs at him again, punched down this time. He gets up again.

“Don’t fucking push me boy. It’s your turn tonight.”

Lucas charges again. This time his father picks him up off the floor. He kicks his legs pointlessly.

“Mum,” he shouts out. The man laughs.

“You’re calling for that cunt? Boy, she’s not going to help you with nothing because she is fucking nothing. She’s a fucking lunatic.”

He carries Lucas into the front bedroom.

*

Mother’s in the armchair. She’s humming and in a soft voice starts to sing. Dream Lover. It doesn’t drown out Lucas’s cries.

“Because I want...”

*

He drops Lucas face down onto the mattress, pushes the back of his head down and holds him in place with one knee in the small of his back. He ties his wrists and ankles with shredded linen. Lucas’s screams have become desperate heaves. He pulls the boys trousers off.

*

Tanya is hanging from her wrists. She hangs and listens to her brother.

*

Mother’s cigarette has burnt away untouched. The ash falls to the floor in one piece.

*

In the street a dog runs up to the blood soaked cloth, to the mangled baby. It sniffs at it. It runs away.

the tenancy agreement: chapter 2

2010-08-01T12:05:00.005+01:00

2005

September

On hot day they waited beneath still grey London skies, six friends of male genital. Waited before their new rented house, whose adjoining terrace rolled uphill like an ancient vein, awkwardly adorned with bike parts or potted palms, anomalous even in the terrible mugginess of late summer, their thick stringy leaves left flaccid by the climate. The pitiless streets of the city’s South East hung limp around their boredoms and their personalities, the old telegraph hill rose away from them carrying with it their unknown futures, overseeing the dirge of the urban sprawl, the desperate vertical reach of their swollen London. There was fried chicken in the air, like sick in the morning, bathing them all in thick grease and reconstituted stench and Halal slaughter and penetrating through pores. The house was number sixteen. At their feet were piled black refuse sacks full of clothes, boxes of books and crockery, endless guitars whose strings hummed in the heat, and they passed a litre bottle of lager around the six of them, drunk piss warm in large swallows.

“He’s late,” said Tom. Short for Thompson, weirdly. That was his first name. He had long hair and paced nervously around the shingled front garden and spoke to himself alone.

“What’s his name?” asked Jonathan, never Jon and Jonny even less. He was Jonathan on paper and Jonathan in his head.

“Lucas,” said Ezra, named from the Bible and tormented by his own agnosticism.

“Lucas. Landlord Lucas.”

“Well where is he?” said Tom.

“Who?” said Greg, distracted by his own long fingers and the cigarette between them. Lovingly they call him skull face. Tom had a dream where Greg’s face existed without skin or tissue or musculature, just a bright white skull with eyes in the hollow sockets. He had dreadlocks too (in the dream), but it was never made clear where the hair was growing from. It had only been a dream.

“Who do you think?”

“Stop worrying.”

Tom sighed. Rolled his eyes.

“Stop worrying he says. I have more than a thousand pounds in my pocket.”

“Put it in your wallet,” said Greg.

“It doesn’t fit in my wallet.”

“That’s not something to worry about,” said Joe. A small time coke dealer, Joe wore sunglasses in the house and stole expensive shirts and went between shitting money and crushing poverty, often within the space of a few hours. He always got things done.

“He’ll be here,” added Greg.

“He’s already an hour and” – Tom checked the time – “four minutes late.”

“Tom,” said Ezra, inimitably patronising. “He wants us to move in. He wants us to rent this house.”

“I know, I know. I just find it very easy to imagine things going generally wrong.” He thought for a second. “In life.”

The silence was punctuated by smirks, distant sirens. Drum ‘n’ bass played behind upstairs windows and the street throbbed with its futility. ‘kunt!’ has been etched into the dusty back doors of a parked van, made good humoured by the punctuation. Ezra gently laid a hand on Tom’s shoulder.

“It’s not your fault you know,” he said. “That she left. If it counts for anything I never knew how to talk to her.”

Earlier that summer she had walked out on him. Their nine months together had felt like a decent lifetime, even though the whole period had been tainted with anguish and the expectation of failure. After she had left Tom she had fucked these two other guys, both guys he knew even if he wasn’t friends with them. It felt like the ultimate betrayal. The fact that they had broken up when she did it made it worse rather than better. When she told him he had smashed a mirror with the leg of a metal chair. It might have felt liberating if it hadn’t been so crushing.

“Listen to the dickhead,” said Conor, who made tonelessness sarcastic, who smoked himself into Buddhism, drank himself into hedonism but ended up theorising himself into involuntary celibacy. He had worn a chin beard for years that never grew, and his weird intelligence was turning his hair white.

“You don’t know how to talk to anyone, Ezra,” said Joe.

“Fuck off Joe. No one knows how to talk to me.”

“16 SHELL ROAD,” Jonathan shouted loudly. Volume was his non-confrontational way of diffusing confrontational situations. He often shouted addresses for the purpose.

“Is that supposed to be a toast?” said Tom, holding the last foamy swig of lager to his lips.

“No. A realization.”

“Good,” said Tom, and swallowed, wincing when the drink hit his tongue. In collective impatience they all turned down the road. The house looked great. Double fronted terrace, decent garden, basement, cheap. There was a woman walking up the road alone, dressed in paint flecked jeans and a shirt. She was quite heavy but had an attractive face. She smiled at them as she got closer and they could see the outline of her tits.

“Hi,” she said. Joe glanced at Jonathan, his darting eyes overtly sexual.

“Lucas?” said Tom. Laughter, perhaps too hard.

“No,” she said. “I’m a woman.” Seemed friendly enough.

“Right,” said Tom. “I just meant...”

“Ignore him,” said Greg. “His girlfriend left him.”

“Did she have a man’s name?”

“Actually quite funny.”

“O Jesus ignore him too. Madam,” said Ezra, puffing his chest as though its tissues were a sought-after relic or an incredible aphrodisiac. He bowed a little, playing the skewed role of ill-groomed gentleman. He became archaic in his seductions, a throwback to his own weird constructed sense of historical romance and chivalry. Or plague and suffering. Pre-Reformation dating methods. “You’ll forgive my acquaintances I’m sure, but we are today moving into this property and currently awaiting our new landlord – who is running slightly late – so he might provide us with the keys and thereby grant us formal entry into our new year of... this. Your friendly gait as you approached our standpoint suggested some familiarity with the situation and so, almost understandably, my friend here must have assumed...”

“That I was him?”

“Most so.”

“I’m his sister,” she said.

“Wonderful to meet you Mrs...” said Ezra.

“Tanya. Lucas apologises for not being here but he isn’t feeling too well today.” They all stared at her expectantly. “You do know about Lucas?”

“What about him?” said Greg. Tom had picked up his bags and was standing next to the front door.

“He’s in a wheelchair.”

“A wheelchair?” said Tom.

“Yes.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“God,” said Greg. “I’m sorry.”

“What for?” said Tom.

“Not to you.”

“What for?” said Tanya.

“The wheelchair. I mean.”

“It’s not a problem,” she said,

“Of course it isn’t,” said Greg quickly, betrayed by his own words. “What does it matter? Wheelchair’s a wheelchair. A symbol or something.”

“Something for society to label,” said Joe.

“Or a means of motion,” said Tanya.

“Motion.”

“He broke his back as a child,” she said, disrupting the bullshit. “He’s fine with it. He’s healthy and gets around more than I do. He just does it in a wheelchair. He thought he might come round in a couple of days to catch up with you. Didn’t he tell you I’d be letting you in and sorting out the paperwork?”

They all looked at Tom, who shook his head. Weak breeze broke the silence but it stopped almost instantly, no momentum to keep it going. In the blinking quiet Tom lifted the bottle to his lips and tipped it up and up. It was empty. He awkwardly lowered it to the pavement. Ezra cleared his throat.

“Excuse me. Tanya?” He gestured with an open palm to the mound of luggage on the floor.

“Oh I’m so sorry,” she laughed. “Let’s get you in.”

They all picked up their bags and boxes and Tanya took a small brown envelope full of keys from her bag. She pulled out one set and opened the two front doors and made her way across the threshold, followed by Tom and the others.

“We used to live here as kids,” she said. Slow with memory. “Before we inherited it.”

“Really?” said Ezra.

“Yeah. Lucas and Me.”

the tenancy agreement: chapter 1

2010-07-28T20:01:00.007+01:00

1974

May

The record plays. Bobby Darin’s “Dream Lover”. The man has placed the needle down with dirty fingers, his nails thick with shit, black, cuticles cut and scarred. It starts with a crackle. The turntable struggles against itself, the grooves of the record worn in with play. The sound dulls out the flies, buzzing in the thick dead air, congesting the windows, daylight filtered through the jerks of insect bodies. An electric fan rotates on the floor, pushing the stifling air, moving piles of papers and spent food wrappers scuttling to the corners. Off-white walls are doused in greased hand prints. There’s a mattress on the floor beneath the windows, no sheets or pillows; it smells decayed, like expired soft furnishings, like sun-turned chicken, unwashed and layered with skin cells, sweat, sperm. Dead brown blood of indiscernible age. The boy is laid out on the mattress naked. His back has deep cuts running down it, into the sparse flesh. It’s thick with blood. Stick arms pulled rough behind him and bound tight and hard at the wrists with plastic ties that slice into the bone with each of his short breaths. He can’t help whimpering. Like a fucking animal. He’s an animal on this mattress, Darin’s angel voice constructing inhumanity in his pleas: to God, to girl, to fuck.

“Shut up,” says the man. His voice scraped out of his throat.

The boy tries to stifle his panic, gasping in air he can’t keep down. It’s a practised ritual that always plays the same. The man opens a can of beer and drinks from it in ordered mouthfuls. He opens his belt.

“Dad,” he says. “Please dad.”

“I said shut up.”

The man punches the boy in the back of the head, a quick hard surprise. His faces hits down on the mattress, its harsh fibres scrape his skin. The quickly empty beer can thrown to one side, lost in the room’s parameters. The man is singing along. His thick arms too are covered in recent wounds, wet scabs trying to stem the flow of blood. He is panting excited, his jeans edging over buttocks.

“Please dad.” The boys name is Lucas.

“You’ll shut your fucking mouth.” He growls this, dehumanized by the intricacies of the stylus, by 1950s soulful pop.

The man lowers his stubbled chin towards his child, hovering with a bizarre sexual tenderness above the broken skin that was once smooth. He runs his chin up and down the back, his nose buried at the base of Lucas’s hair. Their two breaths merge reluctantly together in the silence behind Darin’s precious urgency. The whirring fan is like a claustrophobic addendum to the song. You can’t hear Lucas crying over the ancient vanes. There’s a resignation to his tears. It has happened before and it will always happen. The man licks at Lucas’s back inquisitively, tonguing the cuts with increasing energy. His head pushed downwards Lucas tries to focus through wet eyes, staring sideways from the mattress, towards the door. He thinks about his sister. The only toy he has is on the floor too far away to reach. A bear he calls Samuel, solid like brick with dirt from where he sucks its limbs when he’s asleep. He always waits for someone to come through the door. Samuel has his back turned on the mattress. Lucas screams when the man sinks yellow teeth into his shoulders and his underarms. Can’t help it. Can’t move. Man’s too heavy. Drunk pigfuck breath turns his stomach. He pushes one big hand down into the back of Lucas’s head.

“Dad.” He tries to speak past the tepid blue-white tartan of the mattress design.

“You’re just like me,” says then man with the authority of self-approval. “And we’re just like everybody else. Say it.” He rams his head down harder.

“We’re just like everybody else.”

The man rubs his rough hands over Lucas, who closes his eyes and tries to black it out. He still feels the roaring pain. He stays exactly where he is. The man sings and he fucks his kid.

“Because I want... a girl... to call... my own... I wanna dream lover so I don’t have to dream alone.” Etc.

Lucas cries, and outside the window the world goes on.

fortune cookie fortunes

2010-04-16T19:23:00.010+01:00

Here is a list of fortune cookie fortunes:

1. There is a time to be practical – now.
2. You go forth to fortunate betters.
3. Your future will be defining.
4. Pure luck is a statistical no-no.
5. Every way beats which way like rock beats scissors.
6. Go fuck yourself.

Although only one of them is a genuine fortune cookie fortune, it nonetheless inspired me to have a range of "Idiot Child Fortune Cookies" made, each of which would feature an inspirational one-line quip from our favourite idiot child: The Idiot Child. The fortunes could say things like "Suck my tiny cock you dead moron", and "Fuck your needs and hopes".

All in all I think it'd make for some pretty funny fortune cookies.

I found a company online whose sole provided service is to make fortune cookies with fortunes of your choosing. I'll have to find out if they'll do them smeared with the expletives that are so integral to the Idiot Child's unique insight.

Although I'm sure no one would want to buy the Idiot Child Fortune Cookies it still seems like a good thing to do with all the time and money required for the project. They would make great gifts for friends and loved ones.

cat dreams

2010-04-02T10:45:00.006+01:00

Over the last few nights I have had three dreams about cats. I tend not to remember my dreams, but these three are all quite clear, although I don’t know why as they don’t seem especially significant. It might be because I started calling my own cat Peterson as a joke. My wife said it wasn’t really fair to call her Peterson, because she responds to her own name (Willis) and it will confuse her, but I said “Peterson” in the same high-pitched tone of voice I would usually say “Willis” and she still looked around expectantly and meowed at my face. My point was that it was more about tone than recognition of word choice. Cats can’t speak English etc. Even if I call her a cunt in the right tone of voice she still looks at me. I love cats. It’s hard to trust people who don’t.

Dream 1:
In this dream my parents owned the C of E cathedral in Norwich and we lived in it together, but still let the public and the religious come in and look around at the artefacts and architecture. Our beds and living room were amongst the crosses and paintings. Willis lived there too and spent the days running about the huge stone space, making the weird growling noises she makes when she gets excited and breaks my things. She is small and soft. My sister and her husband came to visit and they brought their two Springer spaniels and a new puppy they had, which although only weeks old was about the size of Willis, and they got along very well and played together and ran about like friends. I spent the whole time my sister was there trying to keep the cathedral door closed so that Willis couldn’t escape onto the busy road outside, but my parents kept telling me that they had to leave it open to attract visitors. After a while the puppy ran outside and Willis ran with it, through the huge wooden door and onto the road (which was a road from Cambridge, not Norwich). Like prophecy I knew that Willis was going to be run over, and I threw up (in the dream) and woke up (in real life).

Dream 2:
In this dream I was in a high-school school reception for some reason, towards the end of the school day. A little boy with red hair was hugging my legs but I made him let go and then left him crying there with his sister, who was shouting something at me in a language I couldn’t understand. Outside it was getting dark and snowing. I started walking home, the path running alongside a deafening busy road. There was a group of three youths standing around outside a house. One of them came up to me and as he walked past he hit a small vibrating pig into my shirt pocket with a miniature luminous pink tennis racquet, which was about eight inches long. I pulled the pig from my pocket and held it in my hand. Behind me I could hear the youths laughing. I turned to the road and instead of being full of cars and traffic it was thick with giant cats and the noise was their purring.

Dream 3:
In this third dream I was taken to the sun by two winged cats, and entered its core. Somehow the heat of 13,600,000 Kelvin was perfectly comfortable. In the core I was greeted by the acceptable face of TV physics, Brian Cox, who had his own head and taut features but the body of a man-sized cat. He smiled at me relentlessly. He talked to me about the real formation of the sun, and how it hadn’t been formed in the big bang but was the product of something far more incredible. We walked around the sun’s core and met other famous scientists who all had cats bodies beneath their perfectly preserved head. Isaac Newton had the body of a Persian. Richard Dawkins had the body of a Bengal. The biggest of them all was Charles Darwin. They told me that cats had built the sun and that the creator cat was Willis. She was the unmoved mover. Brian Cox then flew me out of the sun’s core and to an orbit around it, and when I looked down I saw Willis’s giant head in the centre of the sun. Her head vibrated with excitement, her hypnotic eyes drew me ever further into the great void that lay within them. She opened her mouth wide like a yawn and swallowed the sun, the universe, Brian Cox and I, everything. There was nothing but Willis.

I don’t know where on earth these cat dreams are coming from, but I enjoy the way cats legs move when they walk; their varied vocalisations and their nose touching; their obvious wisdom hidden behind constant mistakes. When I was young we had a cat called Oscar. When he got very old he climbed over our garden fence and into the garden that backed onto ours. We were all worried about him and tried calling him, coaxing him back home, but he just lay there in the sun. Eventually my sister and I crept around into the neighbouring garden and carried him home. We put him on my parents’ bed and he just lay there, as though he was waiting for something. He died when my dad got home from work. It was incredibly sad. Another cat I knew went to the vet to be neutered and the practicing veterinarian said that he (the cat) had the smallest two testicles he had ever seen, which seemed pretty unprofessional. Yesterday morning Willis pulled a whole curtain down while she was trying to climb up it like a weird snake. She often strikes me as slightly reptilian, like a caiman. I did call her a bitch while I was picking up the shards of broken curtain hook, but it was done with love, and she turned around and meowed at me as I said it.

the postcards

2010-03-28T16:23:00.022+01:00

In the heady days of 2007, my wife – then girlfriend – and I decided to buy a handful of used postcards in an antique shop in Brighton. They were all addressed to a Mr and Mrs L. Ryden (the L. stands for Leslie, his wife’s name is Joan). There was something appealing about the very restricted voyeurism they afforded, the snapshot glimpse into someone else’s holiday life that you could reconstruct through those fragments of text meant for other people, or through the photographs of locations you had never visited yourself. As I got to considering the postcards over a refried bean fajita, I became intrigued by the names I read, the addresses that went with them, and the recorded tasks they considered significantly of merit to note down. A huge narrative was unfolding between the static texts of the postcards and, immersed in the thrill of it, I rushed back to the shop to buy the entire stack of postcards that went with them, in the hope of compiling a weird story that could span years, even generations. The postcards appealed precisely because they weren’t meant for a wider audience, because they weren’t fictional blueprints just waiting for reinterpretation by an audience of thousands. They appealed because they were reality, at least for somebody, and to re-read some strangers truth, to reappraise its occasions and its turns of phrase and then rebuild them into something entirely unreal was a very attractive prospect.

We sat in the pub and thought about the postcards, about the possibility within them to shed light on lives, maybe even on our own. The more we talked about it and looked for some correlation between the people and the places they had visited the more I wanted to follow the trail, to plot these many locations given representation in the postcards and thereby make our own story borne of this shared framework, our own real story that would become part of this bigger story itself. With drunk enthusiasm I thought I should utilise a metafictional narrative, split down the middle into:

1. The self-conscious fiction we would compose from the postcard story.

and

2. The story of the real-life journey we would take together to research and write this fiction; a true story, itself laced with fictional asides and straight possibility but always remaining in the footsteps of an authenticity we made through living; all photographed and logged on typewritten sheets as we would drive the travelled roads of these other people’s lives from the clues they left cryptically penned on postcard backs, their language English but still all their own.

Their story – from postcards and fantasy – would become our story. Theirs would frame ours and ours theirs (I was reading “Bad Wisdom”, by Bill Drummond and Mark Manning, and I think it had influenced me a lot more than I realised at the time).

As I trawled through the pile two inches high I noticed a few postcards from the same place, the Langdale Chase Hotel in Windermere, the Lake District, this Britain. One of the postcards is striking in its monochrome, a black-and-white world beyond the terrace. “View from Langdale Chase Hotel”, it says, and the view is mighty trees and distant hills and the great expanse of the still barren lake and murky skies and two odd benches and stone globes heavy like guardsman like ancient Greece, the acropolis of Windermere:

Something about the name of the hotel, this Langdale Chase, made me think about an epic whodunit, of meticulously suited gentleman and their glamorous female companions travelling the country and the world and leaving behind them a trail of martini glasses and murder. It would be a postmodern Agatha Christie, but debauched and ultraviolent in fractured sentences and completely at odds with the otherwise formulaic structure of the genre. The names from the postcards would be my suspects, my victim, my detective, while the photographs would ground us geographically to this international mystery, giving us some sense of place, and at the heart of it all would be the Langdale Chase Hotel.

*

‘The applause of Lake Windermere dusted the terrace of the Langdale Chase Hotel like human hands. Joan and Leslie Ryden sat silently together, a visible consternation spotting their otherwise immaculate visage. They sipped Bloody Marys in the early dusk, the sun long dropped beneath low spring cloud, the sky dense and grey above the great lake, itself peppered by boats left empty on the waves, succumbed as they had to encroaching night. Six o’ clock. They had arranged to meet Marilyn over half an hour ago, but she was still yet to arrive. The letter left waiting for them at the hotel reception had been thick with uncertainty. Marilyn’s punctuality was beyond reproach.’

*

We talked about it for a while and decided to stick with the murder mystery idea, thinking it would be fun to plot a fiendishly complex crime alongside our own attempts to write about it. At the time neither of us could drive but we decided that as soon as one of us learnt we would buy a cheap car and set off to the distant places we saw in the postcards, and like a split personality I would write a page of each story consecutively, first the murder mystery and then the journey, each narrative constantly broken up by the other until they joined together somewhere in the future of what I might write. I would type it all on an Olivetti typewriter in the front passenger seat of the car or in hotel rooms and it would be on pages torn from a reporter’s notebook, with a jagged top edge from where it was ripped from its spiral binding.

The second of three postcards from the hotel was this:

Although not a view from the hotel itself (it’s Derwentwater, apparently) the correspondence says “Langdale Chase, Monday”. Sent by someone called Lillie (how perfect for my mystery! I can see her now, in the italics of her faded ink: the daughter of an eminent physicist! Her long elegant backless dress, her pearls and jewellery, her perfectly curled hair, her frightening makeup, her deep voice, her cigarette, her tiny tits, her voracious sexual appetite sweeping through the Lake District! O welcome Lillie!) she writes of rain and journeys, then sun and scenery. Her meteorological obsession is unhealthy. Is Lillie on the brink of insanity? Will Lillie’s obsessions lead to murder? Does her predatory sexuality hide a disgruntled genius? Where does Lillie stand in this false false murder?

*

‘Lillie loathed the lake; its steamers, its tourists, its banks, its merriment. She loathed the Langdale Chase Hotel. She peered again through the terrace windows. It looked like rain coming but only a shower, the day’s clouds too fickle by far for any greater commitment. She looked toward the barman – who hadn’t taken his eyes from her since she arrived – and nodded for his services. A funny little man, little more than five feet five, the blood vessels in his face reddened by the monotony of Lake District life. He walked to her table and bowed so slightly, his diminutive height even more noticeable up close.

“Martini,” she said drily, like the drink itself.

“Madam,” he said, and shuffled back to his bar, a white towel draped loosely across his jacketed arm.

She was the only guest in the quiet bar and she gazed out of the window, listening to her drink poured. The barman was soon by her side once more.

“Madam,” he said again, smiling as he handed her the glass. She sipped from it, her thick almost organic red lipstick staining the glass edge. A funny little man, but a man nonetheless.

She swallowed the rest of the drink down in one, leaving the olive behind. Lillie loathed olives. She handed the barman the empty glass along with a small square of white paper and left the bar, the movement of her hips like willow trees, he thought. He smoothed his thin hair back across his head and opened the paper to its fullest. Hotel stationery. A room number was written on it in perfect hand, blue ink.

Her room number.’

*

The third and final Langdale Chase postcard was sent by the same pairing as the first. Their elusive signature simply reads M & D. Mum and dad?, we posited over lager. A pair ripe for murderous intent by anyone’s standards. Mummy and Daddy, hideous and overweight. It is their deviant sexual practices that hold the Langdale Chase circle together. Their opium fuelled orgies bind this group of aristocrats, linked irrevocably in guilt and uncertainty. There is no escaping Mummy and Daddy, sensuous flesh pulsing with every thrust. They hold societal power, they are figures of importance, but beneath their wealthy surface lies violent depravity. They will stop at nothing to satisfy their own urges. Integral to my story they will read like the obvious suspects – their genitals, their debauchery, their aggression, their changeable moods, their barely concealed criminality. Too obvious. Their second postcard:

I have edited the address out of this. it is one of those long postcards that folds out into six different images within, with a long section for correspondence backing the pictures. Although most of the pictures are standard postcard fare, I will include this other one, of the Langdale Valley, as it might provide a wider sense of the geological features surrounding our now vital Langdale Chase Hotel:

I glanced through the pertinent points of their lengthy, near illegible correspondence, but found little of interest.: “I intended writing this last night,” it says on the reverse of picture postcard, “but we were joined by a mother and her son from Bradford [...] we sat and talked until 11:30 [...] full of Yorkshire humour [...] birds are singing [...] lovely pine trees [...] 10:30 Windermere station [...] sitting out on the terrace [...]Ullswater.” Coded? As I flicked through their text I realized how the truth of these people’s history had already ceased to matter. They had a new truth and I was making it. They were my characters and so was I.

*

‘”Ah Mummy and Daddy,” said the hotel clerk, without a trace of discomfort or irony. “Your usual suite is ready for you.”

“Very good Dervishly,” said Daddy through his plentiful moustaches. He was stretched into grey pinstripes and looked to the wall clock. Two local boys were carrying their luggage into the hotel foyer, and Dervishly rang the bell for service. Half past six. Daddy pulled his gold fountain pen from his jacket pocket and began to unscrew the lid.

“Shall I sign the register, Dervishly?” he asked.

“That won’t be necessary Daddy,” he replied. “It’s all been taken care of.”

“Excellent.”

“And how are you Mummy? You look, if I may say so, ravishing, Mummy, ravishing.”

“As always, Mummy,” said Daddy.

Blushing slightly, Mummy beamed, her doughy face compressing her small eyes to near invisibility within its fleshiness. Her considerable bosom quivered with delight.

“That’ll be all Dervishly,” said Daddy. “Have our bags sent up to the suite.”

Mummy and Daddy walked to the elevator and took the short journey to their deluxe suite. The barman Jenkins was standing outside room number 15. He looked nervous as they approached, and took two small steps away from the door.

“Jenkins,” said Daddy, smiling approvingly.

“Daddy,” said Jenkins, bowing. “Mummy.”

As Jenkins rapped uncertainly at room 15 they reached their own door and unlocked it slowly. The suite was dark, the curtains already drawn, only one lamp burning in the farthest corner. The smell of opium was heavy and sickly, but Daddy inhaled deeply, relishing the odour. He immediately began to undress, as did Mummy. There was a naked woman lying on the couch, in her 30s but in good shape. Her thick pubic hair sat in perfect contrast to her pale skin. She appeared unconscious though her eyes were open, her slightly cruel mouth parted at the lips by a half inch.

“Marilyn?” said Daddy, gently. He touched her shoulder, but the woman didn’t move. “Marilyn?” he tried again. Mummy took the extinguished pipe from Marilyn’s fingers and set it down on the coffee table at her side. Daddy lifted Marilyn in his thick arms and carried her towards the bedroom.’

*

We had been in Sussex while we decided whether to move to Norwich. We had left London and were staying with my parents, but were finding it hard to find a place to live because we didn’t have jobs and no one would rent a house to us. We offered to pay one landlord six months’ rent in advance, but he said he wanted to know where the money came from and we told him to put his house hard into his rectal sleeve. In the hope of finding work for the summer, and with half a thought to move back to Brighton, we went and stayed with my wife’s grandparents on the South Coast. It was hot and we didn’t find work. I was trying to finish the Nuclear Powered Heart but felt too anxious to write. Finding the postcards inspired me. We didn’t have a car and couldn’t drive and had no home it didn’t seem to matter. The postcards gave our story life.

Marilyn was from the postcards. She wrote like she was young, flat facts and tidy handwriting, her information minimal. She would have to be our murder victim, the crux of our mystery. The Marilyn of the postcards wrote from Perthshire:

But the Marilyn of my mind was American, lured to England by Mummy and Daddy. Orphaned, susceptible, Jewish – Rothschild, her family name – oddly beautiful, she was found in San Fran by Daddy’s sister Vera, who frequently holidayed in the US and worked as a barrister. Marilyn grew up in the Lord’s care at a convent school but was kicked out after being raped and impregnated by a visiting troupe of training clergymen. She had the baby and gave it away, lived destitute in California. She dreamt of movies and singing and salvation. Vera promised her all three things. Vera’s postcard was from San Francisco:

Vera was Daddy’s adopted sister. They grew up wealthy in the Suffolk countryside. They had fucked when they were teenagers and had been doing so since. Daddy often said Vera made him the man he was, made him realize the beauty of extremes in everything. All things are good when taken to excess became Daddy’s maxim. He and Vera held masked sex parties in their father’s house, for the good and great of society. The police commissioner’s balls would swing a wide arc into the socialite widow’s clitoris before the applauding young Daddy. The depravity of their experimental youth would shape their future, would drive the plot of the murder mystery. Vera’s social facade was immaculate but she was dark inside. She wanted to engulf youth as it had once engulfed her.

*

‘”What’s your name sweetheart?” said Vera. Her English sounded official in the California night.

“Marilyn.”

“Such a beautiful name. How old are you Marilyn?”

“Twenty-six.”

“Do you live here? On these streets?”

Marilyn looked away, her eyes stinging wet with the shame, the embarrassment of it. She was so lost and alone in this city, in this life. She knew how dirty her clothes must look, her fingernails, her pretty face sooty from the exhausts of the passing automobiles. In such glamorous company as this English lady, her dresses so meticulous and her jewellery so fine, she felt disgusting. The woman’s kind face leaned into her own. Her features were delicate, as though painted on by an artist’s steady hand.

“Come with me, Marilyn,” said Vera, holding her gloved hand out. “Come with me. I’d like to help you.”

Marilyn cautiously took her hand, weeping as she did, dabbing her eyes with end of her sleeve.

“Madam I...”

“Shhhh, Marilyn. Everything will be alright now.”

The two women embraced in the street, the world moving around them.

“What do you dream of Marilyn?”

“Of movies,” she sobbed. “Of singing.”

“Then sing you shall. I will take you England. My brother and I. We help girls like you.”

“Oh thank you!” she sobbed again. “Thank you.” She imagined the distant England, rich with its culture, its history. She was saved.

“My darling,” said Vera. “My sweet, sweet girl. Give me your hand.”

She did, and Vera lowered it, down her own front, over her stomach, and between her legs. Marilyn’s fingers pushing the glorious dress up. She felt Vera pushing herself down onto her fingers, felt the shape of her opening.

“You will be fine now Marilyn. You are safe now.”

Marilyn felt Vera’s hands dancing across her own two breasts, felt herself falling into a taxi, lowered onto a hotel bed, so thick and soft, felt her body stripped, felt the smoke inside her, in her lungs, in her veins, saw Daddy before her, on top of her nakedness, felt his flesh about her, felt the room cave in, she felt it all, felt it, it was a part of her.

“Think of England,” she whispered. “Think of England think of England.”

*

As my thoughts progressed through our conversation I realised how much the story was developing itself, in my mind, how already its homage to A. Christie had been superseded by a kind of neo-noir thriller, lipstick and shadows, grey urbanity and countryside steeped in depravity, a class divide centred around sexual exploitation and drug trafficking. I could feel the brutality forming behind the words. I wanted to hang to onto some of the whodunit formula – wanted to write the absurdity of a room full of suspects all patiently undergoing some casual interrogation by a genius cop, and have the contrast of this bizarre gentlemanly ritual sitting uncomfortably alongside the awful violence of the rest of the story – but I decided to follow the story, to let it lead me. The postcards and I had developed a weird relationship, organic. We were growing and developing together.

The next characters were three: Mary, Maurice and Christopher, M M & C the chosen abbreviation of their flourishing signature. My suspicions were aroused by their choices of holiday destination. Their postcards spanned the breadth of the northern Welsh lands, and so their characters formed themselves. Always together, the postcards signed as a trinity, they might have been a regular family – ma, pa, lad! – but I knew better. These three were showmen, freaks, they said, Maurice and Christopher born as one, conjoined twins, thoraco-omphalopagus, fused down the chest and sharing a heart, condemned to a life of fraternal proximity! And Mary, medium Mary they called her, medium in all her traits, physical and emotional, she was their keeper, of course, their agent. She was their mother, sold them out for scotch money and bacon bits and medical supplies, always together, always in wales, “THE LAND WHERE FREAKSHOWS NEVER DIED”:

This postcard is from Criccieth, and one of many sent from the M M & C Trinity. It’s a strange postcard. The random seated woman in the red top, enjoying the view of the temperate bay, is either unsettling or comforting, whichever way you look at it. The text provides few clues to the motive of their presence. One line says ominously:

I didn’t dare imagine what they were referring to. The other card of interest was as follows:

Twee without a shadow of, etc., but further evidence in our story of a consistent tour of Welsh villages, for reasons made plain above: the exhibition of the ‘joined two’: Maurice and Christopher, the brothers grim, found by Daddy and lured into his own depraved coital circle like sex aids, like living fetishes. It is the closing words of this correspondence that would send a shiver down any spine, which begin to tie together the dreadful extent of Daddy’s perverse network:

This was the first reference we have had to Anne, daughter of the Ryden’s and another pivotal character in the unfolding misery. So long, they say, in French, and to Anne specifically. Child Anne, virginal Anne. Where was the link, Anne and the three? We had Anne in our minds.

We’ll get to you, Anne.

*

‘Under dim electric lights the show went on, it always went on. Mary jeered from the wings, chain smoking, the audience baying in the Welsh language like ugly singing and flicking pennies onto the tiny stage. Maurice and Christopher walked out slowly; they wore just underpants, proof of their biological joining, their two chests attached and smeared into one, their faces oversized on their small shared bodies and contorted with an inner pain, the perpetual scream of their own death masque.

The audience gasped in their own saliva. They had known what to expect but they somehow hadn’t expected it. Women hid behind their hands but peered through fingers, guiltily intrigued. They whispered amongst themselves about the practicalities of life: just how did they do things? How did they toilet, how did they – no, I couldn’t possibly say the... how did they do... it? The vital act?

Maurice and Christopher performed their stand up show. One did jokes and the other the punch lines; the hand of one slapped the face of the other; they tried to chase each other about the stage but were, of course, conjoined. The roar of the crowd drowned out the organist. The show lasted for a quarter of an hour. Mary had walked off halfway through to speak with the organiser, demanding payment. She pointed at the twins as she spoke. They were bowing in their underpants.

A vast man approached Mary, applauding as he did so, a taut smile hidden beneath his powerful moustaches, themselves covered in a thin film of sweat. He handed her a card. It said “DADDY”.

“I want you three to come with me,” he told her. There was no Welsh in his accent. Englishman. “How much?”

“Where to?” asked Mary, pocketing the notes from the show’s organiser. Maurice and Christopher had walked down the stage steps and were trying to manoeuvre their way through the crowd towards Mary. The townsfolk were reaching out and touching them with probing fingers, as though they were alien creatures or something altogether despicable. “A show, is it?”

“Of sorts,” said Daddy. “I have... interests.”

“Interests?”

“And friends. Many of my friends would very much like to meet your sons. To know them.”

“Friends?”

“Human pleasures,” he explained, laughing jovially. “We want to offer you all a life of pleasure.”

“I’m not sure I...” Mary was rubbing her hands together, absentmindedly.

“I can make it very worth your while. My friends. They will pay well for such an... interesting experience.”

Mary folded her arms and looked at Daddy. He was very well dressed.

“Maurice, Christopher!” she yelled. “This is Daddy. He’ll be taking us on a trip.”

Daddy took off his own vast suit jacket and draped it across the twins’ bare shoulders. They were swamped in the material.’

*

They needed each other like internal organs, like oxygen. Alone they were nothing and Mary knew it.

Anne was the sender of many postcards. Throughout the collection we saw her grow through her handwriting, from a child travelling Britain (we guessed on residential school trips) to a young woman in Europe. Her youthful energy, her devastating good looks, her prized chastity, all of these make her vital to the story of Langdale Chase Hotel. It was her parents, the Ryden’s, who recommended the hotel to their acquaintances. Friends of Daddy’s since adolescence, Joan and Leslie Ryden, Anne’s dear parents, were very much within his circle. To Anne, he was Uncle Daddy. She knew only of his charms, his generosity, his big healthy smile, but Daddy was waiting for Anne; he wanted to be the first, and the Ryden’s would be handsomely rewarded. Anne saw the glitz of her parents’ lives and she wanted it for herself. She was very close to Marilyn Rothschild, Daddy’s adopted daughter. Marilyn told her of opium and how to love a man, Anne told Marilyn of Paris and Copenhagen and Barcelona. They slept together as friends but Marilyn would always be gone by the morning. She was an innocent, Anne, but there could never be hope for her in the sick wild world. From Denmark she sent this:

And on it she had written this:

I could imagine when the panicked Ryden’s received this postcard, their chaste angel alone in Copenhagen with crewmen and sexualised girlfriends! The risks were too high, Daddy had a huge stake in Anne’s continuing virginity, and they wouldn’t have her throwing away their fortune for a Carlsberg-fuelled five minute bunk up in a cramped berth. As parents they had to protect her! As parents they had to sell her young body, to entrench her in the perversity that had shaped their own lives, their upper class coital society, just a scratch beneath its respectable veneer! In desperation they had one of their people meet her in Copenhagen and return her safely to England, verifiably untouched. Showered with apologies and presents and all was forgiven, Anne none the wiser, Daddy’s offer still safe in hand.

*

‘Anne flounced into the room humming Billie Holiday. Joan and Leslie Ryden sat in stiff armchairs, Daddy stood powerfully in the middle of the room, basking in the heat of the fire. Anne’s hair was long and blonde and framed her gentle features. Daddy examined the way her skirt hung, the barely perceptible curve of her breasts beneath her crisp blouse, her tanned legs firm beneath her stocking. He did it in an instant. A thing of beauty. He approved.

“Uncle Daddy!” said Anne, enthused. “What a glorious surprise.”

“Ditto and likewise, dear Anne,” said Daddy, taking her hand gently in his obscene paw and placing the gentlest of kisses on its rear. He looked into her eyes as he did so. She smiled broadly. “May I say how lovely you look today? A feast for the eyes, wouldn’t you say Leslie?”

“Very much so,” said Leslie, looking not at Anne but at Joan. They smiled.

“Uncle Daddy, you’re exceptionally kind.”

“Exceptionally honest, Anne. It has always been my downfall.”

The room laughed heartily and Anne seated herself by the phonograph. She thumbed through the records but played none of them. Daddy felt her radiance in his trousers.

“And how are you, Anne?” he enquired.

“I’m very well Uncle Daddy. Thomas is taking me out tonight, to a show.”

Leslie’s eyes widened, his gaze jerking to Daddy, who stood unmoved.

“Thomas?” he asked, his tone playful. “A boyfriend, is he? The lucky chap.”

“Uncle Daddy,” said Anne. “You know that you’re the only man for me.”

The Ryden’s shivered at her flirting. She didn’t know how true her words were. She was a beautiful girl with an incredible allure. Had she yet realised that? Was she now blossoming as a woman, progressing towards intercourse with this... this Thomas?

“Oh Anne, you do know how to tease an old man!” said Daddy. He had walked over to where she sat and placed a hand on her shoulder. She looked up at the towering man. Was she nervous?

“Thomas is definitely not a boyfriend Anne,” said Joan. “You could do infinitely better than that... person.”

“Don’t worry mother, I have no romantic interest in Thomas.”

Daddy beamed at her and squeezed her shoulder.

“There’s nothing wrong with waiting for the right man, Anne. He might be the last person you would expect.”

Leslie swallowed his brandy and moved to the bar to pour another. It wouldn’t be long now.’

*

My wife noticed that the Ryden’s lived in Girton. I had been so engrossed with the pictures and the correspondence, and the fantasy that was growing out of my head, growing so big as to make itself real, that I hadn’t even noticed the address to which all the cards had been sent. It was weird because she had just graduated from Girton College that summer, a coincidence that seemed important. It felt more and more like these postcards had been there for us, been there for us to build their narrative.

We started to plot a theoretical route on a crudely drawn map of England, scrawled on a brown paper bag. It wasn’t really a route, more just the places from the cards that we needed to visit, dotted where we thought they might be. Starting with the Langdale Chase Hotel. Our geography wasn’t up to much, but we didn’t give a shit. Our own journey would give context to the murder, the plot inseparable from the stuff of our realities. I still have the map, its lines like spidery reminders to act, to act.

Like life our story needed a hero. Our story needed ANTHONY! A man not afraid of a little heroism! A man not afraid of a little foreign travel, for necessity or for the sake of it! A man not afraid of violence in the name of good, or swearing in the name of swearing! ANTHONY! A street-tough P.I. who speaks as he thinks: rarely, and crudely at that. A ‘crime expert’, he left a long career in the Metropolitan Police Force for both moral reasons and a change of lifestyle. Now based around Windermere, Anthony will be one unorthodox half of the crime fighting force that might solve our unfolding murder. His postcard hails from Italy:

Mountains, trees, sky of devastating blue – where does Anthony fit into this picture? The Italian decoy? Was he working, was this the product of an expenses paid trip to solve something unmentionable? A life tormented by darkness, intense Private Investigator Anthony’s Windermere is one of crime, his crusade one of goodness, his voice so strong it demands the first person, standing amidst the third, our metafiction shredded yet further by postmodernist method, boundaries blurring in skewed memories of films and Ellroy and expectation and disrupted narrative mode.

*

‘The dark night falls over me.

I smell the body before I see it and I know who it is before I smell it. Spoiled meat. She’d gone missing weeks before. Marilyn Rothschild. The District’s own premier American-Jewish orphan turned socialite, debutante and casual pornographer. Raised by Daddy. I took the job without thinking.

I know Daddy from an agriculture scam that we pulled across two or three years when we were kids. Left me good for money, he was in it for the laughs. I ended up in the police, then the PI game. He was a made man. Used my severance to buy an office space, some business cards, view of the lake. I was his first choice. He said I knew shit like no one else. He sneered when he said it, like I disgusted him.

The body's a mess. They’ve cut off her tits and broken her nose. Windermere breeds sexual violence. Her face is caved right in. She’d been a good looking kid. Not anymore. I look around for something to go on. In her busted mouth there’s a square of white paper. Langdale Chase stationery. It says: “Stop the global anti-animal Jewish conspiracy!” Rings a bell from some low-grade lit I’d picked up in a bad toilet. Animal whoring. Said the Jews were big on it. I say its bullshit, but there’s one dead body here and fuck knows what else. Where did a girl like Rothschild fit into something like that? I know she had porn racket going but fuck. I pocket the paper and phone the body in anonymously. Don’t need the bullshit. It’s my fuckin case. I call Daddy. He’s going to have to hear it from me. Marilyn and the animals.

At Daddy’s place the maid leaves me waiting in this huge hallway, says he’ll be a minute. I don’t sit down. There’s a photograph framed on an oak table. Daddy with these conjoined twins sat on his lap, flanked by two Doberman bitches. He’s smiling like he shits money. A door opens and I hear his voice.

“Anthony,” he says, drawing out the vowels.

“Daddy. Can we talk?”

“Come in,” he says. I do. He hands me a scotch and we sit on red leather chairs facing each other.

“What the fuck is this?” I toss the square of paper onto the table between us. He picks it up and reads it.

“Anti-Semitism’s what it is,” he says and hands it back, smiling.

“Yeah? What about the dogs?”

“Anthony.”

“And Marilyn’s little nympho penchant for the sex trade?”

“Indiscretions at worst,” he says. “A far cry from a network of animal prostitution perpetrated by my adopted Jewish daughter.”

“Really?” I say.

“You know me, Anthony.”

“I do,” I say, “and you’re a sick fuck. We both know what you’re into, Daddy. So did Marilyn.” We sit in silence a minute, the ice chinks on the side of the tumblers. “You sure this wasn’t you? One of your ‘parties’ get outta hand?”

He smiles again, amused.

“Why would I hire you if it was something to do with me? I would never jeopardise anything that goes on behind my closed doors, Anthony. We both know that, too.”

“Oh, I don’t know. To shake me off the scent? To cover your back? Money’s not an issue.”

“She was my daughter,” he said.

“Most people don’t fuck their daughters.”

“I’m not most people.”

He’s right about that, and the fact remains: Marilyn is dead, anti-Semitic shit littering the scene. The question is: fuckin why?’

*

In Anthony we found this unlikely hero, but we knew that we needed a balance, the cock to his balls, some more orthodox law enforcement, playing by both the rules of man and the rules of God. Although it was constructing itself into something else within my mind, I still wanted to use some of the formulaic elements of the classic whodunit, and for that I needed a straight laced cop who played it by the book. Anthony was the maverick, who turned his back on the force for the freedom and the expense account of the P. I. life. We needed a lawman whose rational insights bounced off of Anthony’s violent conjecture and underground connections until they reached the same conclusions, like they depended on each other, neither of their individual methods sufficient on their own. That’s where Bernard comes in. Bernard: The Religious Policeman:

What a considerate man he is, hoping upon hope for good sleep for all! And signing his correspondence with name, cross, and blessing from on high! This is our man, our BERNARD, fighting crime for King, Queen and Christ! Rejecting the priesthood in favour of something more tangible (police investigation), he nonetheless retained his Christian faith, and with a combination of prayer, reason and good policing has racked up an exemplary track record in high-profile cases. Sent to Windermere to investigate the shock murder of Marilyn Rothschild, Bernard is drawn into a world of loose morals, easy murder and sexual mania, where only his most intense Christian beliefs can save him from succumbing to the very real depravity of human life, but where a face from his past threatens the stability of everything that Bernard holds dear. He is a man tormented by his own inner turmoil, his own interior battle, constantly struggling to reconcile the urges of his own man’s brain with his love and respect for God, tortured, anguished. And yet amidst this crisis of faith and fuelled by their mutual desire to crack the case, Bernard and Anthony will be thrust together in darkness. It will be an unlikely buddy story, their hatred turning to respect with Bernard not afraid to get his hands dirty and Anthony not afraid to get his clean. A match made in Windermere!

*

‘“Bernard?” said Lillie, rushing onto the terrace of Langdale Chase Hotel. “Bernard? Is it you?”

Bernard looked around, the voice familiar but from where? He gasped when he saw her, knew his mouth was open.

“Lillie!” he said. He felt drunk on surprise, although he had never been drunk. She ran over to him and threw her arms around his neck.

“Dear Bernard,” she said. “How I’ve missed you!”

“Lillie!” was all he could manage to say, his tongue stuck on the word that rolled like music from its undulations.

“Let me see you,” she said, like a mother examining her prodigal son, despite him being almost ten years her senior. Her eyes were like lakes as she looked into his and he felt his knees weaken. He remembered the day they had met, in the seminary. She was the daughter of famed physicist Hans Krankberger, who was attending as part of a week-long science versus religion debate; he had brought Lillie with him. Bernard had met her over modest food and they had talked for hours, about science, God, priesthood, love. He had already felt his faith faltering, before Lillie, felt struck by the pointlessness of a priestly life; he wanted to help people practically, all people, not only the faithful – he had no interest in making that differentiation. For him, faith was a matter of practical life, this life on earth, and of doing what he could to make it better. His time in the seminary had made him realise his true calling: law enforcement. As he spoke to Lillie into the smallest hours of the night, he felt the torment of his faith afresh. She was so beautiful, radiant with all of God’s finery, and her young body seemed so out of place in the drab grey seminary. She talked about the wonders of the atmosphere and kissed him softly, and Bernard was paralysed. As her teenage hands wandered across all parts of his holy body Bernard had thought he was going to die, thought he was blacking out while her fingers tried to free him from his garments. In his mind he saw the crucified Christ child, saw the pain in his eyes and the blood of his wounds, he saw the end of the world, he saw hell and torment unfold around his own fornicating form. He screamed and fled the room, Lillie left on the bench behind him.

He had seen her again the following day, and he had awkwardly apologised, and she had warmly accepted, but he knew that things had changed, they had had to. How could they not? He left the seminary and joined the police force. That had been nearly twenty years ago.

And now here she was. Now thirty six, he guessed, she was still profoundly beautiful, and once again he felt the stirrings of his crushed lust in his blessed loins. He had tried to live as a Godly man, he had remained celibate despite leaving the seminary, but here, in the glorious setting of Lake Windermere, confronted by this angel, he felt the sin of the region biting away at him.

“What brings you to this hellhole?” asked Lillie, both of her hands clasped around one of his own. “Sorry,” she said, noticing Bernard’s wince as she uttered the word. “This... place?”

“Murder,” he said, taking his police identification from his inside jacket pocket. “Tell me, Lillie,” he said, leading her back through the French windows and into the bar. The little barman glared at them, he noticed, at Lillie in particular. She was stunning, pressing her body into his as they moved to a vacant table. He swallowed and prayed silently to himself, just three words: God help me. “Did you know a Marilyn Rothschild?”’

*

We talked about timeframes before our generations and our narrative were awash in incoherence, illogic and our own fresh gins and tonics. Linear it would never be, but accuracy was essential for a plot so entwined with itself. Considering our characters I posited a near-sixty year span, from the turn of the (twentieth) century up until approximately 1955 (as the year of the murder). Such dates would also tie in with the political leanings of two of our final key players. Madeline and Reg, married: one-time supporters of one Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists circa 1936, known violent anti-Semites and social flyers owning a wealth of Cumbria land. Widely travelled around the European continent – no doubt to Italy in Germany throughout the unrest of the 30s, key funders to Mussolini and the Nazis – this particular postcard hailed from sunny Mallorca:

‘Madeline and Reg smoked cigarettes in Daddy’s suite, poured exceptional scotch and dashed it with a touch of soda. Reg spoke with Leslie Ryden at length about the Jewish problem. His opinions had fallen firmly out of favour since the war, but there were numerous pockets of the upper classes who still burned with the passion of Mosley, saw the Jews as a harmful force responsible for their own problems and for the problems of the western world.

“You know why?” asked Reg, referring to a question he had asked minutes earlier. “Money.” He rubbed his thumb and forefinger together as he said it. “It’s not a conspiracy if it’s true,” he said, as if it explained his position. It was sort of his catchphrase.

“Conspiracy?” asked Mummy. She was sittiing on the chaise-longue with Madeline.

“They call it a conspiracy theory, the Jewish problem, but it’s not a conspiracy, Mummy. It’s truth. The Jewry is running the western world; all of the power, the money, the influence is in the hands of the Jew. People are fools to think otherwise, and even greater fools to let the bastards get away with it.”

“But Reg,” laughed Leslie. “Surely you can’t be condoning Hitler’s actions? The Holocaust?”

“Can’t I? Perhaps the Fuhrer was slightly overzealous in his approach to the problem but it was a problem, and the man should be congratulated for trying, at least, to deal with it, for the sake of his own blasted country. Maybe it’s something we should have had the tenacity to address ourselves.”

“But you can’t be suggesting that all that needless death...”

“Now listen, Leslie. The Jews are a parasite, they are vermin. They sweep into a country en masse and they take it, they restructure its power for themselves, thus forming the most powerful international community in this great world. Their interests,” he said, drawing hard on his cigarette and savouring the smoke, “are not our interests. Something needs to be done about it. Our dear friend Tom – Tom Mosley – he had the courage to speak out, to open people’s eyes to the truth, and look what happened to him. People wouldn’t listen, Leslie. They are blind to it, but my eyes are wide open.”

“I bloody hate the Jews for one,” said Madeline gently. “Awful types.”

The door handle turned and Daddy entered the room with his customary pomp. He hung his hat and coat and ushered Marilyn into the room. Leslie stood up. Madeline gasped audibly, dropping her whiskey glass on to the thick carpeted floor. It smashed reluctantly.

“Good God!” muttered Reg scornfully.

“Ah, Madeline, Reg!” said Daddy. “How good of you to join us. Please meet Marilyn, my adopted daughter.”

Marilyn approached the pair, her fabulous hand extended in greeting, but neither reciprocated the politeness of her gesture.

“Pleased to meet you,” she said instead, the subtly American tinge of her accent arousing even more suspicion in Reg, who stood and walked briskly away from the girl.

“Hmmm,” was all Madeline could bring herself to say. She looked at the broken glass on the floor and rushed to join her husband at the bar.

“Is she... Jewish?” said Reg, his back turned on both Marilyn and Daddy. He tried to sound nonchalant, failing entirely.

“Is that a problem?” said Daddy, obviously amused.

“No, no. Which is to say. It might be, yes.”

“Reg,” said Daddy. “Just give it a go. She’s very... accommodating, aren’t you Marilyn.”

She said nothing. Daddy moved his enormous frame towards her and unbuttoned her blouse. Marilyn stood still, her arms limp by her sides. He removed the rest of her clothing with deft hands, well-practised. She stood naked before them. Daddy rubbed his hand between her legs and kissed her on the mouth.

“Very accommodating,” he said.

“But I couldn’t,” said Reg, staggering trancelike towards the allure of Marilyn’s flesh. “She’s Jewish...”’

*

I was aware of the extent to which reality was blurring. The barrier between the story we had created and the reality of the postcards had almost completely disintegrated; the fictions we had made had become more convincing character profiles than any measly facts we could extract from the monotony of the genuine holiday correspondence. There was no need to try to extract ‘truth’ from the postcards, it was a meaningless abstract. The truth was whatever we decided it was. There was no slur on the character of the people from these cards, no matter how outlandish our story became – they were nothing anymore, superseded by imagination and perversity, created by narrative.

For our primary cast of characters we had only two people left. Their correspondence sent from Pembroke Castle, Jim and Penny were legitimate business partners of Daddy’s, and ran an exceptional bakery with a tearfully good loaf, so perfect, in fact, that consumption of the bread would make the eater cry, heavily, involuntarily, lengthily, tears shed for yeast, for flour, for salt and water! It was a physical response, like a knee-jerk, and any eater was powerless to stop it. The bread was that fucking good.

They were only in their early thirties and had become involved with Daddy as personal bakers because Daddy was a bread connoisseur. As he wept his tears of yeasty joy he begged them to join his staff, which they did for money and creative freedom. Under their floury aprons they were shrewd businesspeople, never lured into Daddy’s debauched society parties. Catering: yes; merciless sexual intercourse and drug usage: no. They were there as professionals to provide bread for the happenings and that is what they would do (although Penny did once fuck Leslie Ryden it was a drunken mistake and not part of an orgy; it was a one-to-one affair, duration: 120 seconds of mild excitement). Compartmentalisation. As the flesh around them merged into one hideous genital, they spoke amongst themselves and planned new recipes, a skill as impressive as it was repulsive. Forever on the periphery, their role in the story would nonetheless prove to be more pivotal than one might at first imagine.

*

‘The bell above the bakery down rang. It was Daddy’s ring.

“Good Morning Jim,” he said. “The lovely Penny.”

“Hello Daddy,” said Jim. “What can I do you for? Is everything set for tomorrow?”

“Everything’s fine Jim. I just fancied a loaf. Of the good stuff.”

“Coming right up.” Jim kept the bread counter locked on his side. He pulled the key from his trouser pocket and opened it up, pulling a still warm loaf out. He bagged it up in paper and handed it over to Daddy. No charge. It would go on the account.

“Still warm,” said Daddy, dulcet, as though he were in the throes of an epic seduction.

“Just out of the oven a half hour ago.” Penny came out from the kitchen area and smiled at Daddy.

“Do you mind if I have some here?” asked Daddy, compulsively kneading at the bread through its paper wrapping.

“Be my guest,” said Jim. He strolled around the counter and pulled up a chair for Daddy, who sat down and tore off a hunk of the fresh loaf.

With a glance at Penny he lunged the bread into his mouth and chewed ravenously, as though he hadn’t eaten for weeks. As he swallowed the first mouthful the tears began, slowly at first but rising in quantity and intensity as he ate more and bread. He slumped down off of the chair and sobbed on the tiled floor. Jim stepped over his body and locked the shop door. He put his arm around Penny and they stood watching him together, Daddy clutching his bread – fingers sunk through into the soft dough – and crying like a child on the bakery floor, his great fat back quivering like an ocean.’

*

We had our cast, characters rich in life and absurdity and psychological potential, all mobilized and waiting for the story to develop around these parts of ideas. My wife’s grandparents were picking us up by car and so we left the pub to go and meet them, drunk in the streets and drained by the excitement. I clutched the postcards in the brown paper bag they had come in, the bag that had become our map, our guide through the madness of the story that was now writing itself in my mind. It felt like if I were to let go of them for even a second, I would let go of the whole story too, the whole stupid thing would come crashing down, replaced once more with the original dull truths written within the normality of the postcards. We had constructed something so much more vibrant than reality and I had to hang onto it with both hands, and nurture its brightness, and make our narrative what really happened.

But then we had our own story to write, the story of the pilgrimage we would take to bring another story to life. It was the story that never got written. Or maybe this is it. One story of writing another. Because I could never finish our mystery. Shit, I could never even start it. It was too big, too good. As time went on it felt more and more like it had to take care of itself, like it didn’t need me to get written, it didn’t need me to become true; it had already happened. The postcards as they were meant nothing to us; we had given them a new life, a new meaning, something that made sense to us. Did it matter that the murder stayed unsolved, that the story stayed as it was, just fragments of possibility? At the time it felt truer than a lot of things that happen. Still does probably.

We can try to imagine the murderer, if it makes us feel better, find the closure to this incomplete narrative, incomplete because it has to be, because it never stopped growing.

Was it Daddy, who slaughtered his Marilyn in a violent frenzy of his own bizarre sexuality, butchered by his own huge hands?

Was it Leslie and Joan Ryden, desperately trying to preserve their own daughter’s virginal integrity against Marilyn’s nocturnal charms, honouring their debt to Daddy?

Was it Anne herself, embittered to aggression at Marilyn’s spurning of her inquisitive lesbian advances?

Was it Vera, always cruel, always evil?

Was it Reg and Madeline, torn apart by the guilt of their inter-faith congress, their anti-Semitic ideology finally given physical manifestation in murder?

Was it Lillie, driven mad by jealousy when she discovered the shocking truth about her own biological parentage, discovered just how she came to be known as Lillie Krankberger and the role her physicist father had played in it all, discovered that Daddy is her daddy?

Was it Mary, Maurice and Christopher, the fuck-up three, responding with finality to Marilyn’s unconcealed disgust at their ghastly preferences?

Was it Jim and Penny, terrified of bankruptcy as they learn the truth of Marilyn’s Jewish heritage, her natural flair for baking and her longstanding dream of a kosher bakery on the shores of Lake Windermere, a direct threat to their tenuous bakery monopoly?

And what of our heroes, Anthony, Bernard? What of them? Do they unmask our murderer with all the civilisation of a whodunit, a simple conversation around a well-stocked dining table? Or do more people die, is more blood spilled as the quest for truth swallows Windermere and breaks out into the world, to Pembroke, Colwyn, Copenhagen, BOURNEMOUTH? Do we go out in a blaze of fists and pistols, of dreadful vomiting, confronted as we are with the deep-rooted atrocity of Daddy’s circle, of its integral role in high society, of its endless freedom from the hand of the law? Do these crimes ever end, are they ever solved? Can there ever be an end? I can see that it would always carry on, just as soon as we had started it.

My money’s on Bernard as murderer. The clues are all there.

The truth is, our real life got in the way of the story. There was too much to do, it was a busy summer. And there was no story. In 2007 we bought the postcards and we drew the map and we talked about a murder, about us travelling the land, following in the footsteps of these strange faceless people. It was a beautiful idea. We gave birth to it like parents and it grew like a child. It was going to be a story about us. I would type it on a typewriter in the front passenger seat but I didn’t know what it would say. It might be five hundred blank pages torn from reporter’s notebooks. I still don’t know. And I don’t know what fiction is. One wrong word can make a fiction. This is a fiction, but it’s also a story about us. Underneath it all it’s only a story about us. Everything is.

the appeal of Jerry Nolan

2010-03-18T17:13:00.006Z

I recently listened to the New York Dolls first album again, for the first time in at least a couple of years. Something about their brand of kitsch menace – like being stabbed in the face by an amusing half-hearted transvestite for a few quid – was appealing to me in these times of chronic unemployment. I was glad to hear that it still sounded pretty good. I remember first listening to the song “Personality Crisis” in Bristol, when we drove there as three in a tan Ford Sierra, which felt better than it was because of the Fargo reference. When I first heard David Johansen screaming I was really excited, and for a while music became all about dirty New York shit like that, and I idolised the dead man Johnny Thunders and listened to the Velvets first two albums all the time and wore sunglasses at night and bought a bag of heroin from a bum called Tim (who down on his knees played a Fender Telecaster through a little amp and sang songs about having no dough), which we flushed down the toilet before we took it because we were pussies. A guy in a pub said “you lot smoke cigarettes like joints”. I thought it was an amazing compliment.

When I looked inside the sleeve I saw this picture:

which I must have forgotten about, paled as it is into insignificance by the classic cover:

I was surprised to see how little effort Jerry Nolan, drummer (far left), is making in the first photograph. On the album’s cover photograph, Nolan (far right this time) looks pretty hot for the circumstances, probably because he has quite a small, neat face. But when you compare that to the Nolan of the first picture it’s a different story altogether. In that photograph he looks like a regular man forced into a skirt and blouse and not at all happy for it, or like a guy who woke up at a party and had been involuntarily dressed in drag while he was asleep on the sofa. His neat face is hard and unimpressed, he is a noticeable distance away from the impeccable Thunders and his feet are a good shoulders width apart. While the rest of the band pout their arses off, Nolan just puts his hands on his lips and looks like a man at a football match whose team are losing badly. Interestingly enough the same bum who sold us the heroin also told us that he was friends with the Dolls, and said that Jerry Nolan was the bands hairdresser as well as drummer. We never really corroborated this evidence, but the tag of ‘hairdresser to the band’ certainly seemed to stick amongst my friends. I don’t know what he was thinking in this photograph though. He looks like someone who is unsure about which toilet he should go into in a busy restaurant. He must have just wished he was in a pair of jeans, I suppose. I can imagine being punched by the confused, psychotic Nolan of the first picture, seduced by the Nolan of the second. That was probably the appeal of Jerry Nolan.

the christian girl (or: a fucking history)

2010-03-04T10:55:00.003Z

I have been having coffee with a Christian girl. It’s been leading to flirtation: she paraphrases scripture and grills me on catechism; I drink espressos for effect, but have to have five or six of them to keep my hands busy. It makes for terrible stomach cramps. When she talks to me about Christ’s death and resurrection I always think about fucking her; there is something sexy about eternal life and her devotion to theological creeds.

Once I put fake blood on my palms as though it were stigmata and showed it to her with tears in my eyes. I thought it would be funny, or that her inflamed fervour might push her into a handjob, but she just prayed for hours without a break, right up until the café asked us to leave. I never told her the truth and hoped that she would forget about it over time.

When I walk her to the bus stop I always make sure we get there a few minutes early. We have a routine of kissing there. She doesn’t mind kissing because she says it doesn’t compromise her love for Jesus. I always get carried away and try to get my fingers into her skin tight jeans, but it never happens; I get a glimpse of her crucifix and start to feel guilty, even though I don’t know why.

At night I dream of her own holy font.

Yesterday I suggested that we played Household Eucharist, substituting communion wine for cheap vodka. I would play the priest. Although she was reluctant at first she had to admit that it sounded fun. She loves the Sermon on the Mount – she lists it as one of her interests on her Facebook page – so I read some passages from it and gave her a hunk of baguette to chew. Christ’s body, I explained to her. She looked at it with her head angled to one side. Then I gave her a tall glass of the vodka and told her it was Christ’s symbolic blood, his metaphoric plasma, but she slapped me on the neck until I conceded: it was his real clear blood, his physical real presence in the magnolia living room, and I a proud atheist! The TV was on quietly in the background. She swallowed the vodka aggressively, anxious for some more Jesus in her digestive tract; it hit her pretty hard because she had never tried alcohol before. About half an hour later we had finished the bottle and I had stripped below the waist, she was in underwear. She was so drunk that she kept slumping backwards while I kissed her, but I put her hand on my dick and she clutched at it like it was a holy relic or an ordained length. I took her pants off and licked her cunt in quick goes; for a while it all felt incredibly concentrated, and to the sound of a daytime property show I felt as close to blessed as I ever had before. Her thighs shook of their own accord with my oral intervention and the hairs on my arms stood upright, and my chest felt tight in awe of her body parts, which all joined so perfectly together, and in my head I wept for the inner thigh, the middle back, the slightly prickled underarm! A few minutes later, when I was starting to rub my dick up and down her and I was going to ease it in, she all of a sudden recoiled away from me and, grabbing her clothes in a ball from the end of the settee, she ran screaming upstairs. She was screaming ‘sorry’, but I don’t think she was talking to me.

I got dressed and made an instant coffee. There was no milk in the fridge and it tasted awful, but I drank it black all the same. About half an hour later she was still upstairs but her father came in. He said hello to me and made himself an instant coffee. I heard him say the word rectum when he looked in the fridge and saw that there wasn’t any milk, and then I heard him pour the coffee down the sink and he came into the living room with a glass of red wine. He looked at the empty vodka bottle on the floor and saw my tousled hair but he didn’t say anything about it.

“Where’s Jane?” he asked pleasantly. For some reason this made me think of her at 40, slightly overweight but gentle and incredibly attractive. I could screw her away from her husband and her kids, sordid meetings in the Premier Inn or ugly passion in McDonald’s toilets, scrabbling for each other’s genitals with the stench of Big Mac still on our fingers.

“She’s upstairs,” I said. I blinked apologetically in his gaze.

“How are you, then?” he said, sipping at his wine. “How’s life?”

I told him it was okay. We sat in silence, straining to make out the property valuations on the TV.

“I feel like I’m waiting for something to happen,” I told him. The fading effects of the vodka had left me feeling very grave. He nodded sincerely. I could hear Jane sobbing upstairs but we both tried not to listen, her father absentmindedly turning the TV up and me shifting in my seat.

“She’s out of control for Jesus,” her father said, an afterthought.

“It’s something,” I agreed, wishing I’d got to fuck her.

“It’s bullshit,” he declared. He was drinking the glass of wine when I looked over at him.

*

There was a place I used to go in Brighton, at the top of the sheer cliffs they had cut away to build the railway lines and the train station. I climbed up on top of a brick wall when it was dark at night and sat up there, bathed in orange glowing light from the street lamps and the groan of the straining sleepers that trailed off along the south coast. The iron beams of the stations rear end towered up like the archaic husk of a ballroom, a shell around which the future could one day be reconstructed. There was romance in the metalwork, the floodlights heavenly white, the brickwork tired and changed. Trains ran below points and isolated portakabins and steel staircases. I sat there with a girl during a secret affair, which started at an awful party after the big anti-war march. We had laid on the floor in someone else’s bedroom in the dark and she said “I want you to fuck me”. I was sick minutes later, diarrhoea too; I left her waiting on the floor while I stood in the bathtub and puked and shit out the futility of the day, the two million ignored protests all petering out to bongos and soft drugs at the Serpentine. I told her about it and she took me home the next day, made me a can of soup, which I couldn’t keep down. We couldn’t fuck for days because I was so sick. It might have been food poisoning, in retrospect, but the possibility of our fucking hung in the air with real anticipation. Eventually it happened; down on the single mattress I slept on, listening to Lou Reed. It was a whirlwind few weeks; we drove in her car and drank heavily, smoked in the dark, walked and fucked through the nights. She picked me up from work at a hospital kitchen and we drove into the grey afternoon and kissed on the beach. Her boyfriend was in Spain. We were too poor to buy condoms which meant I only came once, the last time we did it. In the guest bedroom at her parents place in the middle of the afternoon. I heard her dad’s car pulling up in the driveway through the open skylight on her ceiling and came panicked into the rubber. I thought he’d want to kill me if he knew that I was nailing his daughter in his own house in the daylight. We sat on the wall above the station together and shared strong cigarettes. Her boyfriend moved back to England soon after that. Transport feels so integral to my sense of personal history.

*

Later I went upstairs to Jane’s room, to see if she was okay and to say goodbye. I knocked on the door but all I could hear was nothing on the other side of it. I rested my forehead against the cool wall of the landing. When I was young we had smashed up an ancient bench outside of a village church, which made the local papers. They wanted it to be wanton destruction, or Satanism, or something similar, but we just wanted it for firewood. It was a purposeful act untainted by our religious beliefs. Amongst the gravestones and the service timetables I thought about trying to believe, but it seemed like I shouldn’t have to try. I had stamped my foot through the seat of the bench and felt the old wood break.

Downstairs, Jane’s father was not where I had left him on the sofa. I walked around its edge and saw him down on the floor, doing push ups, his thin arms trembling with the effort. He had moved the coffee table to one side and taken his shoes off; he had his back to me. Instead of numbers he seemed to be counting his regrets with every push upwards. “I should have asked out Sandra Peters,” he said, his face red with the effort, “in the fourth year. I should have taken that job offer; it was so much money and I was just being a coward.” I picked up my jacket and went out of the living room, pulling the door behind me. “I should have slowed down,” he continued as I started climbing back up the stairs. “I should have slowed down before the accident.”

I knocked on Jane’s door again but there was still no answer. It opened when I tried the handle so I went in. She was lying on the bed on her back, still only in her underwear; her face was red from crying but she was breathing, just asleep. A Bible was open on her chest, its gilded leather binding drawing my eyes towards the shape of her tits. I strained my eyes, trying to commit the picture to memory.

On the way out of the front door I heard her dad panting in the other room.

*

Mentally, I use religious terminology to frame my romantic experiences. It makes sense to see the eye of God in a wet vagina, heaven in parted buttocks, Christ in a tired conversation just before the alarm goes off, to fuck yourself closer to God.

*

Years before I had a holiday with a girl I had already broken up with. We had been strictly not fucking in the weeks since the breakup, but had reached an agreement that – seeing as we had booked the holiday as a couple – we would fuck throughout it; I was more excited about that than the prospect of sightseeing or relaxation. We had met drunk and she jerked me off in a room full of sleeping friends, where we had lit an open fire in the middle of the living room floor. The house had been picked for demolition, which gave the party a sort of end-of-days ambience. A couple of weeks later I went down on her on her parents’ settee. She was sixteen and I was a bit older, but we were both nervous and our voices trembled. The holiday was about two years after that. We slept in a tent and in the evenings it would be very dark and I’d roll us cigarettes, and we’d fuck until the tent smelt weird, her short thighs like lanterns guiding my way. It was an odd mood afterwards because we were broken up, and she carried herself as though she regretted the holiday. I had been bugging her all through the week about wanting to watch her piss, and for some reason one night she relented; she crouched outside the tent and did it, and I shone a torch down there to see. There were mallards nesting in the stream behind the trees that backed onto our tent. Her face was sad and caught in the edge of the torchlight and the whole thing left me feeling a bit nauseous; it changed our relationship a lot. Earlier in the holiday we had been at the beach. The trees had come all the way down to the shore, dipping their roots into the heavy salt water. Around the trees there was soggy brown mud, but it quickly became sand as fine as table salt that blew into my eyes with the wind. An old man stopped me. He was walking a small ugly dog and it was hard to understand his accent. In the middle of his weathered cracked face was the most frightening nose, huge and red, but dotted with white crusts that made the whole thing look like a giant scab. I thought about dead leaves, tree bark, plaster, I couldn’t help it. He told me to go to a place called Bembridge. Later we were walking in the rain through some gardens that grew on a huge fissure in the cliffs and we fucked in a wooden gazebo, shaded by huge oaks. She just hitched her jeans down some and I opened my fly, and she rode me, facing the footpath. Something about it felt a bit forced, like we were doing it because we thought we should. I photographed her with a disposable camera, in the bath, but when the film came back developed the picture had been removed. A year afterwards, just before I left to go to university, we fucked for the last time. I hadn’t seen her for a couple of months beforehand and she had been seeing another guy for six months, but I visited her at her parents’ house. It felt refreshing to say goodbye and to let go of an old piece of life, and we went at vigorously, me coming far too quickly. We laid for a while and then I got up to go; she asked me to promise not to ever tell anyone, because of her boyfriend, but I’m sure he’d have understood that it was something we had to do.

*

I turned out of Jane’s street and was going to meet some friends but there was a woman screaming just up the road. She flitted between English and what sounded like Russian, shouting for help. I saw a girl running up to them, clutching a mobile phone, and I ran up too, already feeling crushed by what I knew was going to be my own helplessness. I got into the woman’s front garden and saw a man collapsed down across the threshold of the house. The girl with the phone looked at me and I noticed the tears on her cheeks.

“Help,” said the woman desperately. She stared into my eyes. “He’s dying.”

The girl had phoned an ambulance and was talking to the operator. She was hysterical on the phone. It felt like this had all been orchestrated in advance, that everything was already decided. The man was on the floor at my feet and trying to breathe but I don’t think he could do it and I looked at him. I felt a weird attachment to him, sharing the end of existence. His wife screamed his name, Ivan, and I think she was praying while the girl yelled into the mobile. She shouted CPR instructions at me and I got onto my knees and lifted the man’s head with my hands; it was as heavy as a rock, his cheeks wet with his own saliva. He had stopped breathing, choked on life, his wife trying to breathe her own deep into his lungs. The ambulance came and hurried him on board. It rocked under the weight of their efforts. The girl closed the couple’s red front door and we left. The last time I saw my grandfather he had visited my parents’ house, and when he stood in the garden he cried and said he didn’t want to go home. Why do you bother in the face of death? Why do you not bother? It sounds weird but this dying man was somehow overflowing with life.

We walked together for a while, quietly, and she had stopped crying; I think we both felt reluctant to split up. We had become the truth of something unbelievable for each other, a confirmation. I imagined her legs and her skin. She had dark hair and thin arms. I asked her if she wanted to go for a drive and she said yes. We walked to my car and drove out of town. It was starting to get dark. Our faces flashed blue in the light of the stereo while we listened to David Bowie. It was ‘Always Crashing in the Same Car’.

I pulled over at the derelict Necton Diner, quite far back from the road. She had some sandwiches with her in a plastic bag, one filled with ham and cheese and the other with salami. The salami smelt strong and made the entire car smell with it, the dense air heavy with highly spiced sausage. We at the sandwiches in the occasional quiet that followed a barrage of traffic. The diner ached with death, its counters abandoned, its tables unwiped, swallowed back into the flatness of the landscape, submerged into its wet soils. We got into the back seat of the car and started taking off our clothes without a word, our bodies making shadows with the passing headlights. We did it attentively, her flat chest against my stomach, and it sounded like the trees were applauding us. Afterwards I thought of Jane as we drove back into Norwich.

*

I once worked for two days as a maid at a Butlins holiday camp, partnered up with an amateur middle aged actor called Trevor Blackman. He had a thick moustache and gave me a lift to the job in his red Vauxhall, and he talked with slightly irritating mannerisms about his life as a struggling actor who did temporary catering and cleaning work on the side. Apparently he had a tiny role as a security guard in a medium sized British football comedy, and he told me that his moustache was often useful in getting work in period pieces. When I asked him what period pieces he had acted in he went very quiet. He was also a competition disco dancer; he hand-jived without music and his legs swung dangling loose like string, his finest moves like a drunken Travolta impersonator. Our job was to clean the chalets nearest the beach. We had to wipe the surfaces and cupboards, sweep the floors and make the beds. I hated making the beds. Trevor and I each took one half of the sheet as we limply tucked it under the cheap mattress, me silently, he imagining future acting jobs that would never materialise. He kept mentioning his agent, a company in London who he had sent a portfolio of versatile moustache shots to, but they sounded like con artists, and he was still waiting for the wages from a TV advert he had done nearly a year before. We were really shit maids. I spent most of the time smoking outside the chalets, and Trevor made himself cups of tea and drank them sitting on the doorsteps. After the last day of work he drove me back to his flat, I can’t remember why; it was a surprisingly nice place. He went off to get something from one of the other rooms, which all had their doors closed, and I noticed a stack of pornography under a pile of letters. There were five or six different magazines. I suppose Trevor must have been lonely. When we went our separate ways I told him I would look out for his face on television and he smiled beneath his moustache, his supermarket denim brilliantly blue in his porn-filled Worthing flat. I found him on the internet yesterday, photographed in the local presses: “Worthing’s Disco Man on Britain’s Got Talent”. He made it to the final 200, apparently. In the photograph his tie was yellow and his clothing black. He seemed less steeped in tragedy than the man I remembered, but it was definitely him.

*

After I dropped the girl back home I went to meet an old school friend of mine. We called him Child, a nickname rich with low-grade irony because he had the face of a man twice his age. He was waiting for me outside Tesco, and he held one half of a cheese and onion sandwich in his hand.

“Hello,” I said. I tried to shake his hand but the sandwich was in the way, so I squeezed his shoulder instead.

“You ready?” he asked nervously.

“What for?”

“The protest.”

He explained that he had organised a one-man protest against Tesco. I asked what he was protesting about and he seemed uncertain, but mumbled something about dehumanizing the worker with those self-service checkouts they use. It sounded like a pretty weak protest but I agreed to go in there with him. Child hadn’t been himself for a few months, since he had accidentally killed his own cat. He had been running a fire drill in his terraced house and was carrying the cat downstairs when he lost his footing. They fell together and he had held onto the cat tighter, trying to keep it safe. When he stood up at the bottom of the stairs with a cut forehead he saw that the cat in his arms was dead, its little tongue poked out of its busted mouth; he had crushed it with his falling body. Although he had planned the fire drill himself he said that he had been really tired, on account of how early in the morning it had been. He was crying when he told us this. It messed him up a lot. He kept the cat’s ashes in an urn on the top of his TV.

We went into the Tesco, which was quite empty. For some reason they were playing deafening pop music, which I was sure they didn’t usually do. It was a day of many revolutions. Child walked conspicuously up to the self-service checkouts. I could see his lips moving as he walked. There was a security guard with folded arms looking straight at him from the other side of the checkouts but Child didn’t seem to have noticed. He glanced over his shoulder and then started shouting, right at the checkouts.

“Machine!” he shouted. “Machine! Not a person! You aren’t! You’re mechanical components! VDUs aligned with checkout software! Not a person, with personal traits! Machine!” He was spitting with intensity and his face had turned very red. He was still holding the sandwich.

The checkouts mechanized voices asked him to scan his first item, told him there was an unexpected item in the bagging area. They started a meaningless dialogue with Child, as though they were human after all.

“I won’t scan on you!” he replied. “Don’t touch my fucking apples!”

“Please scan your first item,” said the checkout. They were patient and gave second chances.

“You’re trying to befriend me!” groaned Child. “Your hypnotic lasers! I’m not a coupon! I won’t be won over by your motherboard!”

The security guard had walked over to Child and took him by the arm. Child was crying. The guard led him towards the automatic door. He wasn’t rough with him.

“It wasn’t my fault,” he sobbed. “I fell.”

It seemed like he needed to be alone.

*

When I went outside Child had gone. The security guard was laughing about it with one or two friends; they looked like security guards too and had heads the size of farm animals and blank empty eyes. Their voices made me feel futile. I walked up towards the city hall but saw a part-acquaintance whose name I couldn’t remember but whose face contorted with familiarity. He was sticking A4 posters to the inside of a telephone box.

“Hi,” I said. He turned around.

“Oh,” he said. “Hello.” He was wearing a cricket jumper underneath a suit. The trousers were very short. He looked tired and had red-rimmed eyes.

I asked what he was doing and he passed me one of the posters, which was printed onto yellow paper. It said “Looking for Happiness?” in a large Helvetica font. There was a photograph of a couple beneath; they were both gazing into each other’s eyes and smiling, and each of them was holding a length of rope tied into a noose. “Try Suicide” it said under that, then “Here to help YOU” and a local phone number.

He explained that he had set himself up in business as a suicide doctor. I thought he meant underground euthanasia, but he laughed and said that he made videos for people that would make them kill themselves. Seeing as both of his parents had done it, he said, he knew death, better than most people. When he was six he had walked in on his dead mother in the family bathroom, her wrists cut open and her face still warm from paracetamol vomit. He had felt happy for her because she had done it to be with her dead husband. Seeing that, he said, had made him realise that he could help people take their pain away. He didn’t want to kill them; he wanted to help them kill themselves. It was about responsibility and self-control. He had studied film at university. His videos would push them into the bravery of action.

I asked if he had had any customers yet. One, he said, a guy called Horlicks, like the malt drink.

“He was convinced his wife was having an affair,” he said, “and didn’t want to worry about it anymore. He said he was sick and couldn’t sleep, and I told him it was a difficult situation that we needed to address. In the video I showed his wife fucking his best friend while they listened to ‘Lady in Red’ through cheap speakers; afterwards they both walked around his bedroom and looked through his things, calling him a cunt and a loser. “Look at his shit loser clothes and things,” they said. His best friend pissed on his things then set fire to them. I interviewed his parents for the video and they said they wished he was dead, and they laughed when they said it. Then his wife was fucking someone else, a work colleague I think, with industrial noise in the background. It felt claustrophobic, like a headache. They both looked at the camera during it and said “We hate you Gary”. Gary was his name. Gary Horlicks. There was this one beautiful shot, where on the wall at the edge of the frame, just beyond this man’s white moving buttocks, was a photograph of Gary as a child. He was wearing shorts and had these big tears in his eyes. It was pathos. When they came they grunted out “Just kill yourself.” It was a pretty crushing video,” he said matter-of-factly, squinting into the wind. “Kind of primal.”

“Did it work?” I asked. He nodded.

“He did it.”

“How do you feel about it?”

“I helped him. He was in touch with his unhappiness and I helped him to get away from it.”

I looked at my watch and he said he had a lot more posters to put up. We shook hands like strangers and I wanted to see Jane again.

*

Once in London I visited a strip club in Soho with an ex-lover. I think we thought it might rejuvenate our stagnating sex life. It was a hot May night and I was wearing jeans and sandals, but the bouncer let me into the club anyway, probably because it was so expensive. It cost fifty pounds for both of us to get in. We were taken to a table and asked what we wanted to drink. I felt a weird need to try and appear sophisticated and ordered a double bourbon, which cost ten pounds. I drank it quickly and it tasted like money. We watched the strip show, which wasn’t particularly arousing, silently staring forwards at the moving flesh. After another round of drinks we were asked if we wanted a private dance, where a girl comes and does it right in front of you. I looked at my lover and she nodded so I said okay, and gave them another twenty five pounds. The dancer was a blonde Brazilian in underwear. She seemed really tall, but it was hard to tell because I was sitting down. She spoke to us for a while, as though we had just met in a supermarket or at a bookshop, but she was wearing her underwear and it was a dark club and she was about to strip to her bare genitals right there in front of us. After a few minutes of quite formal conversation she started to dance. She was really attractive and had firm tanned limbs, and her tits were precise. She took her pants off and I didn’t quite know how to feel. It was hard to get too excited in the circumstances. She turned her back to us and looked over her shoulder, then bent over a bit so we could see the intricacies of her spotless cunt, which she rested her fingers over. She faced us then and put one foot up on a chair and spread her legs apart and we stared right into her. Then that was it. We thanked her and said goodbye, and she wished us luck with our degrees. I don’t remember if we went back home and fucked that night, but I’m pretty sure we didn’t. We broke up soon after and only really fucked one other time, a few months later, when things had become incredibly strained between us. In her basement flat we just started doing it. Maybe we were bored. She stopped me and said I had to use a condom. I didn’t have any with me so I went back to my house to get some and rushed back to her flat. I went back inside and we went at it again, me fucking her from behind. I still hadn’t put the condom on because I liked to start off without it. She told me to hit her, but I wasn’t sure about it so pretended I hadn’t heard. She said it again, then shouted it. It’s easy to go along with something like that when you’re in the midst of coitus. I punched her on the back and the shoulders, tentatively, but harder when she told me to. It felt sexy and wrong at the same time. I got carried away with myself and knew that I wasn’t going to get the condom on in time. I pulled my dick out and came on her back. It was involuntary. We found that we didn’t have a lot to say to each other in the minutes that followed. She was behaving like I had committed an incredible betrayal, even though she had told me to do it and I had just tried to please her. It had become a sort of test, and the very fact that I had done it meant that I’d failed. I left our relationship behind with my seed spilt in tender violence.

*

I went over to Jane’s place and knocked on the front door. There was no reply for ages but there were footsteps inside the house, so I waited on the doorstep. It was long dark and the air smelt of coal smoke. I peered through the glass of Jane’s front door and saw a silhouette approaching it. It was Jane. She opened the door slowly and said hello when she saw it was me. She smiled a bit.

“Sorry about Household Eucharist,” I said. I felt relieved to see her.

“That’s okay,” she said. She had put on some blue jeans and a jumper. “Do you want to come in?”

We went into the living room. The coffee table was still over to one side but her dad was nowhere in sight.

“He’s gone out,” she said apologetically.

Jane made us both some coffee while I put the furniture back. We sat on the sofa, the overhead light blaring in the awkward dark. I tried to remember her body but it already seemed distant.

“I still want to, you know,” I said.

“I know,” she said. She picked up a Bible from the table and started thumbing through it. I did the same with a TV guide.

I heard a key in the front door. Her father. He came in and smiled weakly at us. He was holding a yellow poster in his hand, which he stuffed into his coat pocket when he saw me looking at it. It looked like one of the suicide posters.

“Hi dad,” said Jane.

“Hi,” he said. “I’m going up to bed.”

“It’s only eight o’ clock.” She sounded worried, the Bible pages rustled like leaves under her fingers.

“It feels later,” he replied. “Goodnight.”

His footsteps creaked up the stairs. I read about soap operas and listened to him cleaning his teeth, a cursory once over. His door closed quietly. I laid my hand on Jane’s thigh and she picked it up and moved it back into my lap.

“Please,” I said. I hated to beg but it happened anyway. No one made me feel like Jane.

“I can’t,” she said. “I don’t want to.”

“So? Sometimes you have to do things you don’t want to.”

“Not this. Look,” she said, “I like you. As a person. But I don’t want to do it with you.”

“What about the kissing? The vagina?”

“It got carried away. I’m sorry. I have to save myself for Jesus.”

“Fuck Jesus!” I shouted. “There is no fucking Jesus!”

Her face went red and she punched me in the nose. I felt the bone break and my eyes welled up with tears and I could feel blood on my lips and tongue. It dripped onto the nights TV listings. She put the Bible down carefully and walked to the front door.

“Out,” she said. She opened the door and pointed into the street. “Go on, fuck off.”

I clutched my nose and went over to her.

“Jane,” I said. “I didn’t mean it.” I cried because of the broken nose.

“Just go.”

I leaned in to try to kiss her but she pulled her head away and my nose left smeared blood on her cheek. She shoved me backwards and I tripped out of the door and onto the path. I was spread-eagled on the concrete. My face looked dreadful. She threw her handkerchief out to me and said that she didn’t want to see me anymore, said that she was giving up coffee once and for all. The door closed on us.

I picked myself up and staggered through the damp streets towards the cathedral. It felt like talking to a priest might help me make sense of Jane’s stupid religious mania. The wooden doors were heavy to open and towered over me; they were very serious. I walked towards the altar, reminding myself to not be reverent. My flat soles squeaked on the flooring. I saw the priest sitting on one of the pews. He was reading yesterdays newspaper and sipping from a bottle of wine, but had turned to look at me as I approached him. He was about fifty but his hair was thick.

“Can I have a word?” I said. My face felt tight from the drying blood.

“Yes,” he said. “I don’t usually see people at this time of night. Norwich isn’t that kind of place.”

“This isn’t a confession,” I said.

“I’m not a Catholic,” he said. He handed the bottle to me. I nodded and took a long swallow.

“There’s a girl,” I said. “Christian.”

“Ha!”

*

He was a good guy, the priest. Told me I’d be better with a Jew. Jews aren’t afraid to get fucked up at Purim, he said. And you fuck a Jew on the Sabbath there ain’t nothing like it, he said. Sex is the woman’s right, he told me; they want you to fuck them and they want you to fuck them well. He said he loved to fuck girls from the Abrahamic faiths. He’d done Christianity a lot already and was now working on Judaism. He said he looked forward to the fresh challenges of Islam. He wanted to go down on a Muslim girl.

I said he didn’t talk like a priest.

He said I didn’t talk like an atheist.

We shook hands and I went to the synagogue.

my wife the psychopath

2009-10-30T16:43:00.001Z

By cover of night she gets psychopathic, my wife. Nocturnally exhibited, diurnally regulated, the episodes occur with increasing regularity, unravelling in the sanctuary of our home like undergraduate case studies. I love her carelessly, instinctively, but I feel the pressure of her mania like turbulence in our exchanges. Her daytime tenderness is manifest in conversations, in domesticity and romantic gesture. The pain of the world is transported through her broadband connection, and with charitable donations and proposed direct action she purges herself of a dying need to make good with personal ethics. But when the sun sets and the psychopathy encroaches its episodic unreason upon her brain, her breasts, her hands, the goodness of the world falls prey to her screeches, to an untamed madness channelled through networks of unsuspecting synapses.

I dared mention it to a Hungarian psychiatrist friend of mine, this transformation, but only in the safety of daylight, with spatial isolation on my side. I tried to convey to her the horror, but she just smiled and rested her aging fingers reassuringly across my thigh, the tendons tightly strung and visible like thick guitar strings or the complex part of a sophisticated prosthesis. Behind her slightly upturned nose and her fine thin spectacles she smiled, no doubt a beauty in youth, and she comforted me in a voice changed pitch by cigarettes. Her therapeutic sensibilities left me swooning in the strength of her perfume, and her hand cupped my balls and my flaccid penis and we sat there in her office. “The evidence you cite is all inconclusive at best,” she said, artfully massaging her handful. I tried to imagine the contents of her tapered brown slacks, but I pictured nothing beyond the zip, beyond the meticulous stitchwork. “All these examples”, she went on, “they could be resultant of any number of factors physical, psychological, geographical, astrological, meteorological.” She slipped out of her tan leather loafers, her tired feet thinly coated in near-fleshy hued pop socks. Her pitch black bob framed her face in a way some would call alluring. I imagined it falling around me in coitus, in soft pieces. “Hysteria, for example, was for centuries considered a uterine disorder, particular to the feminine. Hippocrates maintained that manias would arise in those women whose uterus had become physically light from a lack of sexual practice, the result of which was a uterus that – unmoored by the power of the thrusting, erect penis – literally wandered up the interior body and compressed lungs, heart and diaphragm, leaving a concurrent madness”. She unbuttoned her slacks and edged them to the coarse carpet, stepping gently out of them one foot at a time. Her legs were streaked with deep blue veins and her pubic hair was very thick and dark, half covered by her now un-tucked shirttails. She stood with her arms folded, something very grave about the expression on her face. “Menstruation, too,” she said, “has in rare cases been known to cause full psychosis of brief duration, limited only to the cyclical rhythms of the menstrual cycle. Much like your wife’s condition, it is a psychosis of a short-lived, recurrent, cyclical nature against a backdrop of regular normality. It comes”, she said, “and it goes”. She spat a large pool of saliva into her right hand and rubbed it into the cunt which I couldn’t see. She looked apologetic while she did it, but maintained the air of clinical professionalism which I used to find so attractive about her. With a practised gesture she opened my fly and silently lowered her weight onto me. Inside she felt different, but I’m not sure how. She sat very still. “Or lycanthropy”, she said with her Hungarian inflection, “often now rationalized as a cutaneous porphyria, it nonetheless depicts this sense of a cyclical propensity to mania, or rather what can often be a overwhelming sense of self-belief of one’s own routine insanity. In short your wife may well have made herself susceptible to psychopathy through some massive sense of her own self-importance, in the sense that she considers the night to be in some way selecting her, requiring her madness, inciting her figurative howling at the very moon it so consistently reveals in its darkness; or she may, on an unconscious level, have a deep rooted traumatic psychiatric relationship with the very essence of what we would consider to be an essence of ‘night’, about the expectations associated therewith.” Eventually she moved herself on top of me. I felt the pressure of her buttocks on my denim thighs. I don’t know if she came but she convulsed once and she seemed satisfied, and I had already come inside her, almost immediately. She went back to her seat and sat in front of me, her legs open enough for me to see a bit of her cunt, red against the black of her hair. She said “don’t ever change” in a very matter-of-fact, diagnostic way. I thought it was a strange thing for a psychiatrist to say, demanding this impossible stasis of personality, because I would change, that much seemed inevitable. I thanked her all the same.

My wife’s psychopathy started about three months ago. I originally put it down to an alcohol binge, but I don’t really know why because as far as I knew she hadn’t taken a drink for a long time before that. I came home from work and she was sitting on the sofa. She was naked and had basted herself head-to-toe in a savoury marinade. For some reason my first thought had been to quiz her on the ingredients, and she listed them for me without hesitation. Olive oil base, crushed garlic cloves, paprika, cumin, curry powder. She described it as Middle Eastern, and I thought it would be good with lamb, but the real issue remained the presence of the marinade on my wife’s naked skin. It pooled in her umbilicus and was garlicky around her nipples. I felt this to be a very odd experience, but as an isolated incident (as it then was) I couldn’t decide whether or not I should panic, whether it should be considered any more than the outcome of a bored day. After all, I was home late and it did smell delicious. I went to the kitchen to get myself a glass of water and when I came back in she was holding a lighter under the curve of her left breast. The oil was smoking and sizzling slightly as it cooked in the heat, and my wife’s face was contorted with the pain of the burning flesh. She screamed at me that she was going to cook herself. I didn’t know what to do. She leapt from the sofa and pushed me over, then started jabbing at her forearm with a fork, as though she were cuisine itself. After about two hours she lay down on the kitchen floor and went to sleep. I watched over her to make sure she didn’t wake up, and in the morning she was very confused as she showered off the sticky spices and the olive oil from her raw limbs.

The day following the marinade catastrophe she seemed so much like herself that I quietly dismissed the previous evening as a glitch. I thought that the pain of her cooking skin would make us stronger as a couple, that the breadth of aromatics contained within the self-marinating would well equip us against a multitude of lives. I drank coffee on the toilet while she ate soup in the bath. Back to the tangibles of our shared happy life.

But that night it happened again, an episode more complex than the marinade. She had been reading when the sun went down, but from upstairs I heard her screaming. Convinced of the best I went downstairs, where she had lined up all nine of our houseplants in the dining room and set fire to them. There was something intrinsically horrific about it, about the wanton destruction, about the formality of it, the geometric accuracy of the line the plants had been organised in, about the clarity of the flames. It was so perfectly orchestrated it was devastating. Behind the flames stood my wife, naked again, but she had written my name across her breasts in jagged smears of eyeliner. Through a fixed smile she told me she was the devil. I wanted to laugh and did, it sounded so ridiculous, but there was a gravity about her nudity that left us humourless. I took a step towards her and she backed away. “Why devil?” I asked. “I am the grandest of them all,” she replied, a voice of mirth. Her skewed egoism was strangely attractive. She opened a New International Bible – which we kept for useful quotations and party games – to the gospels and, holding her cunt open with the other hand, started to piss onto its pages, the rich yellow urine smelling nutty in the freshness of the dining room. Throwing the sodden bible onto the floor she lay down on top of it and said: “Devil says fuck me.” I felt exploited by this devil, tempted into action. She knew I always had a thing about piss, call it a fetish. A paraphilia. Something about piss past fingers gets me every time. I undressed clumsily, drunk on the vision of the piss-soaked scripture, and we fucked, copulating freely on the life of Christ. I came in a frenzy, she laughing and beating me with her fists as I throbbed out the sperm, my spent penis the serpent weapon of her evil plans, and I got up and extinguished the plants and looked down at her on the floor, her eyes at once manic and detached, glazed. She looked beautiful.

Since then things have deteriorated, every night a stage for her psychopathic episodes. With household concerns – so keen to separate her nights from her days – I have been drawn out of our living room and into her madness, an accomplice to her social disregards. We walk these streets, complacent in their marijuana odour, their olfactory narcotic, virulent kebabs dropped as vomit to the floor within an instant of ingestion. We find people together, like a silent asocial date, and then she can batter them while I watch on lovingly, feeling myself in the shadows, a voyeur to her violence, waiting for this phase of our lives to be over. I sometimes benefit from the aggressive sexual impulses that started with our Bible. She is my wife. I like to feel her nails in my perineum, and have her slap my face and leave me bruised for work, explained away by an idle pointless fantasy and never the truth. There have been times when I’ve considered suggesting that she get some help for her problems, when during the day she is so normal, staunchly upholding her own strong sense of ethical values, but I can’t bring myself to do it. The last thing I want is to make her feel as though she has a problem. As a man who understands the feminist literature I can clearly see how stiflingly phallocentric it would be of me to condemn her relishing of carefree coitus or reckless violence. Even a woman can delight in the guiltlessness of these primal urges. It’s not my place to try and stop these things. An intelligent woman must be free for psychopathy. The problem isn’t hers, isn’t even mine. It’s someone else’s, some faceless collection. It is for me to stand by her, and I will, and I will think of her cunt, her urethra, her anus, her kidneys, her soft green eyes and the tenderness of our daylight, husband to the last.

the URINE-8 experiment: part 2 - build (A-side)

2009-09-22T09:57:00.010+01:00

1

I had to build the band then, at once in keeping with and ironically reappraising the well-trodden conventions of the boy band genre. Much like the original Take That line up circa 1990 – 1996, I decided straight away upon a five piece band, primarily for reasons of choreography, harmony and the utilisation of the five stereotypical personality traits common to many boy bands, as follows:

1. The ATTRACTIVE one (this one will be the most fuckable member of the group, with physical attributes conforming to the widely accepted conventions of attractiveness contemporary to the period).

2. The UGLY one (an odd convention, with three main roots of explanatory inclusion in a format so geared at surface appeal and mindless sexuality – firstly, the ugly member provides a fantasy outlet for ‘alternative’ fans, who seek masturbatory consolation in the boy band but without being seen to conform to the more common desires felt towards member ‘1’ [the attractive one], and therefore maintaining their sense of emotional depth and individuality [borne no doubt of an extension of the “everyone else is doing it so why the fuck should I?” mentality, as well as adding credence to the notion of ugliness more often than not equating to sensitivity, decency and a depth of character otherwise lacking in the vain cruelty of the more attractive member]. Secondly, it gives a sense of plausibility to the group, “keeping it real”, to use a comprehensible contemporary parlance. Perfection can harbour alienation, and the last thing a commercial boy band aims to do is alienate its potential audience. By keeping this presence of ugliness a boy band can convey an essence of humanity that would otherwise be lacking in a group of boys with across-the-board model good looks. It’s about maintaining the figurative everyman, as though the dancing few are, in a sense, a cross section of normalcy, boys who could have been plucked straight from the classroom, the supermarket, the hospital ward. Finally, the presence of a revolting member within the boy band unit could very well be a concession to the male demographic, who whilst not the target audience of the musical output could nonetheless be placated by the inclusion of a less-than-physically-perfect specimen, to wit: one significantly uglier than they themselves are considered to be).

3. The SILENT one (a moody type persona, I suppose to add enigma, mystery to the group, all dusky eyes and postured squints, village cowboys of the industrial concrete constructs, faces like puddle reflections. This member will sing little, if anything, and dance imperceptibly. Their presence will be unspoken but integral, and their strength of pointlessness will form the unrealized backbone of the group. No one will fancy the silent one. They will be the ones to turn on Christmas lights in small towns after the group has disbanded in a flurry of futility. Also referred to as the “FORGETTABLE” one.).

4. The CRIMINAL one (a misleading label, perhaps, for a criminal conviction/record is not a prerequisite for the successful appointment of the ‘criminal’ member. Rather, this term is used to describe the edgy, dangerous member of the group: perhaps stubbled of face, dreadlocked of hair or urban of clothing [tracksuits, oversized trousers, baseball caps, {increasingly} tattoos {usually tribal/Oriental symbology} – any clothing in accordance with current trends for the streetwise elements often associated with urban gang membership and/or drug use {primarily crack and speed}]. Such characteristics are again so ubiquitous amongst boy bands because of the sense of realism they provide to what is after all a profoundly manufactured concept, as though they somehow strip away the artifice and leave brutal truth in its place, directly from the streets themselves and not merely the affectation of the brittle whites and greys of urban street and sportwears).

5. The SHORT one (every boy band requires one member to be significantly shorter than average male height, for reasons I can only really speculate. Perhaps the reduced height is advantageous in organising group photographs; or provides a sense of reassurance [the famed “Snow White Effect”, whereby dwarfs and otherwise shorter than average personages are perceived as helpful, ‘nice’ and affectionate]; or adds to the palette of varying sexual nuance for the audiences tastes, fetishizing the short man’s penis, so to speak; or perhaps it stems from a fact as simple as the intrinsic sense of hilarity found within differential human heights, an historically verifiable phenomenon observable even outside of boy band convention and in a variety of other light entertainment formats [flushed face simpletons Little and Large; the famously unrewarding Two Ronnies and Scotch husband/wife school uniform clad perversion the Krankies, to name but three, as well as the likes of Garfunkel’s lofty heights compared with Simon’s rather squat tragedy], as though contrasting height somehow automatically ticks every box in our increasingly complex set of 21st century demands. Whatever the reasons behind these anomalies of stature, the short member remains an integral element of the boy band formula).

These can very well be interspersed – or sometimes replaced – with other off-the-peg stereotypes, such as (briefly):

6. The INTELLIGENT one (reads books in photoshoots; misquotes major thinkers in uncorrected interviews and proffers bizarre proverbs in album signings that appear ponderous and wise but are, at best, ill-considered and meaningless).

7. The TALENTED one (can sing without corrective tuning software added post-production).

8. The ETHNIC one (a token gesture to widen demographics).

9. The STUPID (or playful) one (pulls faces in videos etc., and ends up making everything look slightly cheap and embarrassing. Will fast become the most unpopular member of the group and go on to use boy band credentials to produce one or two episodes of a criminally unfunny sketch show aimed at 12 – 15 year olds).

10. I could go on, etc.

2

It was essential to establish a balance between these conventional personality traits. To utilise a majority of one over and above inclusion of others could well limit the appeal of the group, simply because – as explored above – different types of person will be attracted to different traits within the boy band hierarchy, a bizarre microcosmic sub-societal interface whereby physical ugliness, mental idiocy or social ineptitude – all traits found within the original Take That line up – can be considered as facets of overall attractiveness (as opposed to the perceptions prevalent in polite society). In short, the rules of society do not apply to boy bands. My goal with the URINE-8 experiment was to dismantle current social norms and restructure them as built on this essence common to a slightly deviated boy band (namely the power of such bands to harness immense mass appeal [and effectively, therefore, a significant power over an equally significant audience {consider the Samaritan advice lines set up for grieving, traumatised Take That fans following the bands breakup. Absurd in every sense, but demonstrative of the power of the boy band to infiltrate the mind of their audience. With the appropriate manipulation such a group would be the perfect way to rebuild the social attitude towards sexual perversions by way of mass acceptance on an epic scale, itself based on synthesizer hooks and crudely programmed rhythm sections}. Boy bands in effect become {religious?} leaders, using their musical and social popularity to affect the way people think about the world and their responses to it]), defying traditional ways of perceiving others (and their subsequent worth) whilst using the liberal framework of the male harmony group to instil a [psycho]sexual revolution in the British public built on: lyrical obsession, sexualized imagery, provocative sloganeering/choreography, normalized fetishization of urinary activity. Détournement, remember? Clearly – and repetitively – then, it was crucial to strike the chords of both discontent and desperate longing attraction with as greater number as possible, and to do this I needed to select five distinct band members based on such tried and tested personality types.

I deemed it prudent to consider a number of photographs of once successful boy bands to emphasize the roles these varying personalities play within the boy band structure, and to demonstrate the cooperative symbiotic relationship they have with one another (rather than battling for primacy, so to speak, they each fulfil an organic, central function of their own within the group unit, abolishing all sense of superiority or leadership [while some figures may be, by definition and for example, ‘forgettable’, their importance within the group is nonetheless assured. Without the silent pointlessness of an H. Donald, say, the spine of the remaining Take That package would crumble under the weight of its own tepid appeal, its sanitized sexuality, its alliteratively denounced “cheeky chappy charmlessness”, developed to even further nauseating effects in R. Williams solo material, where the dough-faced poseur – too selfish by far for the comparative anonymity of the band setting – leaned in increasingly nauseating faux Sinatrian directions until the man Williams lost both fan base and respect, and then went {again a kind of sanitized version of} mad]). All for one, as they say in cliché about unrelated topics.

Consider the following picture, as annotated by myself:

Here is an early photograph of Britain’s most successful boy band, the influential (especially considering their reunion, etc.) Take That. I will say now that this particular group have had a profound influence on the way I have approached the URINE-8 experiment, from the number of members (5), to their (crushing) impact on the UK music scene, paving the way for all manner of similarly mindless and very much shit male vocal groups, and to the incorporation of their group name – Take That – into song and album titles in creation of a near-comprehensive near-movement (specifically, “Take That & Party”, textually represented in a wavy font straight out of MS Office WordArt. In point of fact, let us briefly and digressionally contemplate a video for that song. Although, I suppose, somewhat dated, it still retains much of the kind of sound I consider integral to my successful détournement of the boy band [turning it on its head and taking the superficially meaningless and/or throwaway sound, lyrics and presentation of the form but adapting them in provision of complex philosophical ideals. We will have, then, a boy band who looks and – on the surface – sounds like any other {for the purposes of mass appeal}. However, further inspection will reveal a dark and perverse angle to their recordings, a revolutionary stance that could have a very real social and psychosexual impact on the listeners, bringing them together in the liberation of erotic deviance]. The senseless chanting that initiates the song seems vital to the feeling of unity that a boy band can create, that idea of togetherness, a rallying cry of discontent or revolutionary potential, itself a trope common to football hooliganism. Then come the electronic sounds, created without any input from the band themselves, the synthesized instrumentation and programmed drumbeat, about as sophisticated as an early computer game. I want to make use of this heavily synthesized sound, as I think the juxtaposition of this classically boy band sound will stand in powerful irony with my planned Ballardian lyrics of sexual perversion. In fact, URINE-8 is a band borne of such juxtaposition. The shots of the band then convey a sense of joviality: beaches, jet-skiing, playfully singing into microphones in empty auditoriums, break dancing, choreography, larks, japes and volleyball, just five good buddies slapping back and hanging on out, imploring us all to party, that inexplicable almost-subliminal shot of polka-dot underpants worn over trousers at about 1 min 19 [this is still in the days when Take That were as much homo as hetero icons to their growing audience – remember their oiled chests? How could I not, sir!]. It is all presented as a frenetic montage, hasty shit cuts for the MTV mindset, attention spans of fruit, etc. Is that a short tribal-esque rhythm interlude? I think it might be, in this cocktail of the acceptable. While it is easy now to scoff, this kind of quintessential boy band methodology is [at least academically] pivotal in my creation of URINE-8. You need to understand something before you can take it apart. While [I hope that] I will never “understand” Take That, it is fair to say that the real power, the impact of the URINE-8 experiment will come from this dichotomy of boy band thick-slick versus publically unmentionable coital deviance. That is the boy band sound, built then burnt.), an approach I am myself adhering to, albeit in a more militant, encompassing sense to create a cohesive package of urophilic potential! (e.g. “It feels great [to URINE -8]” [with a white rap mid-section and sampled soundbites of Kellogg’s Tony Tiger – “play for the court”; “grrrrr-8”, etc.]; “When we mate we URINE-8”; or the poignant ballad about urophilic cancer sufferers, desperately fulfilling their sexual perversions for what could be the last time, while curious yet sickened medical staff copulate around them in choral interludes in a small NHS palliative care unit in Norwich city centre [including a fully pornographic music video with scenes of unsimulated intercourse, urine and {simulated} necrophilia involving the band and actors playing the roles of various medical professionals, as well as Jesus Christ, in a particularly moving death sequence played out with scratching, cello and a spoken word passage], portraying such traditionally deviant acts as healthy, decent and liberating perversions that rather than being condemned or marginalized should be embraced by wider culture and celebrated publically as a means of escaping the staid, unadventurous, institutionalised approach to intercourse that dominates western culture as a by-product of monogamous relations [although NHS approval of any such exhibitionistic propaganda is still pending], dubbed “It’s gettin’ late so URINE-8 [on me]”. It is, in short, a call not to arms but to bed, where a plethora of sexual acts can then be conducted above and beyond acceptable forms of pleasure; it is a plea to no longer hide those sexual deviances but to celebrate them. Let us not change for society! Let society change for us! Piss on my tits! Piss on my cock! In my mouth! Nutty golden nectar, I beseech you!).

In the photograph, to go on, I have labelled each of the five members with their own stock personality as listed above. Whether these personalities are those the individual performers were – dare I say? – naturally inclined to, or simply the product of the bands ‘manufacturer’ (Nigel Martin-Smith) providing a kind of easy labelling system for press release purposes of snappy photo captions is not really for me to say, but I will consider my ideas pertaining to each ‘boy’ here in brief:

Back row, left to right:

1. Howard Paul Donald: the silent one. Probably never spoke in interviews, instead focussing on maintaining the silent, kind of teary stare he is practising in the photograph above. Although apparently he did sing lead vocals on a couple of Take That tracks, he remains one of the more forgettable members of the group, despite having dreadlocks at a later stage of the bands career. Neither ugly nor strikingly attractive, he is the original nobody (a fact no doubt aided by his career as DJ and house producer. He has a large German fanbase, probably because of Germany’s national desire for both anonymity and guilt. He failed as a solo artist and his one name consists of three names, independent in their own right.

2. Jason Thomas Orange: the criminal one. Orange is a proficient break dancer and – at least in this photograph – sports an awkward smudge of facial hair, all common elements of the criminal or streetwise band member. Despite the thick grin plastered across his face (as forgettable as H. Donald’s, and perhaps slightly uglier), he remains the only remotely edgy member of the group, with perhaps a rough hewn appeal to some members of the fanbase. Unpredictable, Orange was not given lead vocals on a Take That number until 2006. In his life away from the band he has acted and studied psychology, despite leaving school without qualifications and rebelling against his families Mormonism in his teenage years. His background on a YTS no doubt aids his streetwise persona. Some call him the kingpin of the band (although I have found no evidence to corroborate this data).

3. Gary Barlow: the talented one. A self-proclaimed singer-songwriter, musician and producer, Barlow penned 16 hit singles in the 1990s and won the Ivor Novello award. Quickly becoming fatter than the other band members, Barlow focused his attentions on song writing. His clean-cut face and apparent talent made him the obvious choice for mothers and made him one of the main sanitizing factors in the Take That line up. He had a solo “career”, but it is easily overlooked. He claims to have been on a train targeted in the 7/7 bombings, as though somehow he, Gary Barlow, was an integral part of peace or otherwise in Middle–Eastern relations with Western democracy.

Front row, left to right:

4. Mark Anthony Patrick Owen: the short one. Just 5’5”, Owen triumphed in the face of height-based adversity by singing lead on numerous Take That songs and having repeated failed attempts at solo careers in the interim. Humorously small, he even has the speaking voice of a shorter gentleman. He won celebrity big brother, but along with bandmate G. Barlow, lives an ultimately dull life.

5. Robbie Peter Williams: the stupid one. Eyes slightly too far apart, Williams was the perfect band idiot, pulling faces and injecting his own poor sense of humour into much of the bands video material. He was the one with the ‘wacky’ personality, ideal for Saturday morning television. Suffice it to say, he became an international superstar. Whilst he didn’t go on to produce a criminally unfunny teen sketch show, he did eventually lose favour with the record-buying public, wearing woollen sweaters in saccharine, smug Christmas songs and ending up bearded in Los Angeles, hunting UFOs and desperately escaping himself. His post-Take That life can be cruelly summarized in the following battles: drugs, alcohol, obesity, paranormal phenomena, existential despair.

Taken alone, these personalities would be less than meaningless. Taken as parts of a greater whole, however, the interplay between them created one of the most successful boy bands of all time. Selecting the appropriate facets of a given personality is clearly a matter of grave importance in the manufacture of a successful boy band.

3

This next photograph considers the 80s/early 90s worldwide musical phenomenon: New Kids On The Block (AKA NKOTB).

Consisting of two brothers, J. Knight and J. Knight, Joey McIntyre, Danny Wood and Donnie “Older Brother of Actor Mark ‘Boogie Nights’” Wahlberg, the group was a runaway success, paving the way for the demand of a plethora of low grade, worldwide boy bands, a platform for legitimized underage sex fantasies.

The first thing immediately noticeable about the photograph is the definitive lack of any one strikingly attractive member. Despite being a ferociously heterosexual critic, I am nonetheless comfortable enough to consider the objective attractiveness of any male, yet within the ranks of the clumsily abbreviate NKOTB I see little to instil the fires of any illicit self-administered genital compression in any of the five paltry faces on offer. In fact, a considered ugliness seems instead to permeate the group ethos. Unsure of precisely which facial representation corresponds with which of the five names, I will for reference purposes refer to each member as a number (1 – 5) from left to right of the photograph.

1. This particularly ugly member is Danny Wood, a fact I only know because I was so taken by the gruesomeness of his countenance that it somehow merited further research. Shorter than average and with an immense, equestrian, slab-like head, he combines two of the negative stereotypes common to boy bands to devastating, distracting effect. He is, quite simply, ghastly in appearance. I daren’t consider the heinous sexuality he instilled in teenage girls of a certain masochistic tendency, gasping themselves to silent orgasm as Wood’s vast, tilting head teeters jeeringly above them. I considered the fact that perhaps this photograph represented the man unfairly, but on consideration of at least two further pictures (see below), I can only assume that D. Wood was indeed the groups ugliest member, the precursor to Boyzone’s Keith Duffy (himself with ungulate optics) and all manner of other hideous boy band practitioners.

2. Another case of borderline ugliness, this member has a particularly sheer face and features, hardly complimented by his tepid grin into the middle distance and his visible white socks. He is obviously playing the enigmatic card and becoming all the more forgettable as a result. Grossly unfanciable, he either seems cruel himself or at the very least will be the victim of cruelty.

3. The primate in the mustard blazer. One will note the use of question marks in the denotation of his purported attractiveness. His bravado of stance would suggest a leadership role within NKOTB (a role usually associated with physical attractiveness), but his preppy, slightly porcine features do not sit entirely comfortably with such assumptions. No doubt an overweight child, he had by then grown out of his own fat somewhat, but has a face that suggests that he would still break your belongings when your back was turned, spoilt, red-faced, alone. The band is proving itself to be a physically unsavoury one – perhaps my 21st century analysis fails to consider the temporal changes in what is considered to be attractive? Were big faces, like shoulder pads in female business suits, AIDS, and the seductive properties of advertised instant coffee granules, very much ‘of the time’? Answer: unsubstantiated, a resounding uncertainty (of authorial decision).

4. Presents as the – often overlooked – eccentric one. Looks, in this photo, about ten years older than the rest of the band and wears bare feet for reasons inexplicable. Face like an unmedicated Val Kilmer gone off the amphetamine rails. A definite appeal to the confused audience, who find little merit in the conventional members of the boy band unit. He would fuck you, then smoke a cigarette in your parents house, his erection drooping as he drank milk straight from the carton and stole prescription painkillers from your mother’s dresser. He puts me in the mind of an Iron Maiden photograph I saw in a cassette album (it might have been ‘Fear of the Dark’, it might well not have been). In the photograph, taken in a graveyard (or perhaps a mock-up of the graveyard stereotype, grey polystyrene gravestones and dry ice), the even then aging rockers glared menacingly at the camera, all clad tightly within stonewash blue jeans and black leather jackets, their feet geared up in either crisp white training shoes or black boots. They epitomised the ridiculousness of British heavy metal, and yet amongst the jeans, the leathers, the brown mullets, the sneers, stood drummer Nicko McBrain (rhythm of the beast). He wore a full light grey tracksuit (top and bottom), and smiled broadly beneath his scarecrow thatch of blond hair, an expression so absurd amongst his bandmates attempts at satanic stares. Reeking of special needs, McBrain looked like a moron who had wandered into the shot by accident, a virginal fan photographed with his heroes and not a hardened rock star. For me, it was the perfect summation of the role of the eccentric in any group: he provides unpredictability.

5. Short and forgettable. Warrants no further discussion.

NKOTB were mould breakers in every sense of the word: facially, musically, commercially, they paved the way for what was to come. What’s coming is URINE-8.

4

East 17! E-17! “Gritty!” “Political!” “Rap-aligned!” “Yobs!” “Shit!”

5

The careful consideration of stereotypical personality traits is clearly an integral part of the manufacture of a boy band. As a manufactured product, the band can easily be sculpted to fulfil certain functions and features deemed appropriate by their mentor (in this case, my own exceptionally good self). However, in keeping with my oft-discussed notions of détournement, perhaps a slight corruption of these stereotypes will be beneficial to the more revolutionary facets of the bands ethos of liberation, revelling as it does in the freedom of sexual self-expression through a 21st century sense of high-technology, high-speed, international perversion.

To recapitulate:

Boy band name = URINE-8.
No. of members = 5 members.
Thus:
No. of required personality traits = 5 required personality traits.

Resulting from my research into the boy band formula, I have decided to incorporate the following five traits into a point of primacy within my groups hierarchical structuring: (mostly) attractive; (strong but) silent; (notably) short; (unhinged and somewhat) criminal; (gormlessly) stupid. A boy band of such predictable proportions once again has its place in this world, subverting it with the marketability of their sex-appeal, sexualizing it with their synthesizers, liberating it with their careful harmonies, an orgy of flesh so willingly succumbed to poppy tunes (with issues-based [paraphilic] lyrical content).