quite a woman

The cloud was thick and stifling around their grief and they each clutched a handful of earth and threw it into the grave; it fell like hail but in loamy clumps upon their dead parent and smeared the coffin on impact. Her lipstick was far too thick and her face looked cold and swollen, and he was cringingly aware of the deep and rank stench of booze on his breath, of the stubble on his face, the white-ish stains around the crotch of his jeans. The wet mud stuck to their hands and they looked to the vicar and to the funeral director for a tissue or something but were greeted with indifference or else intense disgust. The team of five funeral directors refused even to unfold their arms; they had become quite fond of the parent during over the course of their arranging the prepayment plan for the ceremony, and they now felt personally offended that these two dreadful human beings should hold their parent in such little regard as to be here like this, the only gathered mourners. Like a shitted shoe he scraped his soiled hand through the grass around the neighbouring graves which took forever; she looked at him as though he were insane but then did likewise with her own hand. The vicar drew his stole to his brow and mopped it cautiously, looked to the lead funeral director – a gentle if fat man of low birth, some Michael or Mark, Martin maybe, one of those – for guidance, who nodded mostly imperceptibly. The ceremony was over. The vicar walked immediately to his car while the funeral directors waited for a minute or two for the siblings to join them in the limo.

“We’ll walk,” he said, shouting it through the desolation of graves and marked plots.

“Very well,” said the funeral director, then mumbled “you selfish fuck.” The cars left and he helped his sister to her feet.

“What are we doing here?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Let’s get a drink. It’s what she would have wanted.”

“Who?” she said.

“Mum,” he said, jerking his head in the direction of the grave, the workers slowly getting on to filling it in.

“Fuck’s sake, that’s Dad,” she said. “Mum’s alive, remember? In the hospital?”

He nodded as though he hadn’t heard her.

“She was quite a woman,” he said eventually. He reached a hand for his sister’s breast and worked it between his fingers. “And so are you.” She rested her hand upon his, the both of them upon her breast.

“Let’s go,” she said.

the colonnade

They met by the patisserie in the Colonnade, beneath the clock, near the “strolling ladies” who worked on through the day, just moments from the market place, the central offices of the organisation, the bus station, from numerous amenities. He presented a single flower, a carnation, which she held to her nostrils and sniffed loudly and wetly through her congested airways. Odourless, as ever, save for the faint hue of petroleum from the garage forecourt. She smiled grimly and put the flower into her handbag which, he noted, though empty was almost certainly big enough to travel with, perhaps even for weeks. He took heed of this within an instant. She presented a miniature bottle of the same whiskey he had passed comment on in his online profile not once but in fact on three separate occasions. He fancied himself a connoisseur of the drink but was no such thing, although to his credit he drank and drank heavily. His enthusiasm was authentic and he gripped the bottle like some precious amulet within one hand and leant to kiss her cheek, a gesture he loathed and yet performed frequently; of awkward nature their lips puckered simultaneously and their heads turned together in such a way as they kissed the other’s mouth parts, much to her distaste. He peered this way and that, up and down the Colonnade, and opened the bottle in a practised movement; he savoured the whiff for a second or two then swallowed the contents in one broad mouthful. The incredible burn as it hit the back of his throat made him retch and her eyes narrowed as she observed this. He drew the back of his hand across his lips and sniffed and took her by the arm towards the modest restaurant. He would be profoundly drunk within an hour or so and felt excited at the prospect. She wondered, as ever, why she was there.

on the relative merits of (some of) the oils (the shamed [former] three of top gear in [excerpted] conversation)

"Rapeseed’s my favourite without a doubt. Rapeseed oil. Bloody music to my flat ears. Three of my favourite things yeah? Conveys them, one two three. Simple is as simple twats. There’s rape, obviously. Say no more. Love it, love it, know it. Then seed, as in hot spunk, my hot spunk, by the – i.e. your, as in like, some woman’s – fucking mouthful. And then oil. I bloody love oil. Rapeseed oil. Top of the class mate. Fucking summa cum cocking laude. New breed of must-drizzle, must-slosh, must-arseholing-glug, straight out of the eggcup you gutless mongs. Absolutely bleeding brilliant. You?"

"Listen mate, I hear your missive, I do, I honestly do, who bloody couldn’t, am I right?, I hear it, but I’m a regular bloke with regular kitchen needs. A traditional at heart, vote conservative, bed by midnight, fuck my wife once a fortnight on Saturday’s with the lights right low. It’s got to be olive mate. Olive oil every time. It’s the solid choice. Besides, puts you in the mind of Popeye’s piece, the bandy bint. Could fold that slag in two and feed it in like a roll of paper into an ancient dot matrix. Perforate my edges, Oil, you cunt! Have a gnaw on my Bluto! And you?"

"Vegetable. Cheap, cheerful and un-bloody-complicated. Ever done it with a vegetable? I don’t mean a cauliflower, a carrot, a beetroot, curly kale, celeriac, or whatever. I’m talking about a vegetable. Cripple, a fucking spaz, you know. A mute, a dummy, a brain dead, a fucking comatose veggie case. Lights are on, and all that. Every sod's fucked off. You get me? You ever done it with one? It’s priceless lads, priceless. Just sort of flump, they do, with every push in. Spray your shit all over their faces and it just stays there, drips in great globs down their eyelids, don’t even try to rub it off. Ha ha. It’s entirely comedic. Ha ha. Vegetable for me."

once five hit

The group of near-feral businessmen urinated into their briefcases for Friday was upon them. Once five hit the beast was freed. They gathered around the reception area and laid their opened briefcases on the floor at their feet, then urinated into them with some ceremony, the nutty stench of their luminescent and highly caffeinated piss gripping to the atmosphere. The reception team cheered as the briefcases filled close to spilling, and the intense red faces of the concentrating businessmen morphed with weekend ecstasy into masks aflame. The mood was carnival in nature.

Within the hour they would be standing in shirtsleeves in glass-fronted Wetherspoons, Slug and Lettuces, All Bar Ones, something similar, drinking tall pints of continental lager, swearing tenderly into the ears of bombed women – tan tits worked into paint-tight frocks – who they’d finger in the smoking area before 9pm dreaming of violence, the smell still on their hands when they ate kebabs later competing over jalapeños, spit their gunk in the shape of victory onto the toes of their loafers.

Hungover next day they’d reminisce over testosterone breakfasts, 3000, 4000, fucking 10,000 calories!, until they puked homogenous sludge rendered lurid and bilious from the night’s sauce beneath the railway bridge and later purchase new briefcases ever more extravagant than the last, slaves to their own disposable incomes. By evening it’d be white shirts, designer jeans, trimmed sideburns and aftershave, slapping backs like great sides of meat in complete revelry, a handful of burped phrases signalling their reproductive readiness to scores of white wine girls who’d themselves be tearfully soiling memorials by last orders, perfect hair flecked handsomely with foam hunks of sick, underwear stuck out of dress bottoms like prolapse. It was a national phenomenon alright.

think of england

He was too tired to rouse himself, and the pair of them looked pityingly down at his limp dick as still as a corpse through the split in his pyjama bottoms. Gingerly she poked a single finger into it, felt its slight weight, watched it slump back lifeless into its former stasis. It really was over. He shrugged as though this were normal, a trivial or commonplace matter that warranted no further comment, but such composure was undermined by the panic in his eyes. He felt as detached from the organ as if it were a cut of meat - which in essence it then was - and nothing greater. She squeezed his arm in some instinctive gesture of comfort and he flinched; it was pity, not comfort, embarrassment even. She was embarrassed for him, embarrassed to be involved. He shook the dick in his hands like skin, tried to laugh it off, as though to shake the dick in his hands like skin until such time as it attained erection was a regular and expected component of his sexual routine, a suggestion that they both knew to be false. He clenched until it stung, expecting to feel something, some hardening, some movement of blood, whatnot, but there was nothing. If anything the dick retreated, deeply unimpressed, swallowed into hair and scrotum. She slid to the edge of the bed and put her brassiere back on, took a sip of what must have been cold tea from the chipped Cath Kidston mug she had left on his bedside table. Her face betrayed little but a slight impatience, perhaps frustration, not the customary self-doubt or insecurity people on occasion discuss in such standoffs; she had no doubt whatsoever about her own considerable attractiveness. He cupped himself in one damp palm and closed his eyes and thrust himself slightly and tried to lose himself in a web of mental erotica but all he could think of was an England felled.

“Please,” she said. “You’re degrading yourself.”

“This has never happened to me before,” he said. “Once or twice at most. Mostly never. A handful of times. It’s not regular, but happens sometimes. Weekly. Meet me in the middle?”

She settled the dick away into his pyjama trousers and pulled the two sides across to cover it, like dog mess under leaves on a picnic, like a curtain closing at the end of a theatrical performance. The end being of some pertinence. She gazed upon both it and he with the detachment of a medic and he was struck by a great shame. He reached out a hand toward her thigh which he gripped lightly, and moved his hand up, and looked at her intently as he pushed his index finger into the heat of her cunt which was remarkably wet in further biological remonstrance of his own shortcomings. It stung a small wound at his nail base. She looked ahead as he did this and not to his eyes, but shifted herself slightly to accommodate his efforts.

“It’s no good,” he said. “I just...”

“Be quiet,” she said, but with no cruelty.

She dressed hastily but precisely and looked at her watch. She would easily make last orders. He pulled the waistband of his pyjamas up and peered in at the dick, still defiantly soft, by then almost invisible against the flesh of his mons and the weight of its foreskin, and he felt utter contempt for his body. He shrugged again but felt how meaningless it was, even while it was happening.

“Tell me this happens to everybody,” he said.

“Goodnight,” she said.

She closed the front door behind her, while he sucked hungrily on his finger and relished her memory.

his concerned acquaintances

His acquaintances – not friends, couldn’t stand the cunt – were all the more concerned when his preoccupations shifted solely to what he insisted on referring to as the shape of the girl he had formed some strictly superficial relationship with at work. Indeed he referred to her as though she were nothing but this shape, a geometric abstract, and not a flesh-blood being of infinite complexity and intricate psychology and probably desires. The shape of her from stomach to ankles was exceptional and coiled like something barely molten and only just setting, he said. In fact, he had begun to consider the whole world in terms of geometry alone, as shapes colliding. She wore black desert boots. He wanted to taste her saline snatch on his tongue, their two shapes merged into something compound and entirely impossible to plot. His small talk was poor and his large talk all the poorer. It was all he could do to not reach out and touch her fine hair, and wish painful death upon those who brought creases of laughter to her long pale face. None but he and he alone knew the true interactions of her lines, vertices, curves. His shape work was robust, teacher’d said it all those years earlier, though needed some improvement in the advanced shapes. This, she was his improvement, his baptism of fire. She’d made a geometrician of him. He likely loved her, to the extent such emotion could be possible in less than three dimensions. How he longed for a life on paper.

riding the elephant

She was a repetitive type, although purportedly of decent sort she nonetheless struggled to conceal her violent racism, which for many peers and colleagues was fundamentally at odds with same. She took great relish in easily surmising entire nations with basic adjectival stereotypes, and though she felt at least some minimal affinity towards primarily white English speaking nations (our “flawed cousins”, she said) she continued to denounce the same, swollen, murderous, claiming with great sincerity that her racism was not, in fact, racist and was instead a matter of generic, unfocussed hatred of all peoples, including the British, an awful association of cunts, whispering the foul word so as to soften its impact.


How high's the racist, momma?
Five feet two in flat shoes.

She reeked of ancient sweat and it was eye-wateringly strong, and she regaled the office with long narratives relating to her extensive world travels which, she said, gave her some authority on the off-the-cuff dismissal of the qualities (or otherwise) of entire nationality groups. She said that whilst many people had the money but not the time for travel, she had the time, great fucking slabs of it, but not the money, though she refused to get into debt for anything and destroyed credit cards with relish, instead demanding ever increasing overtime commitments from her devastated husband to fund their pleasure cruises and “real experience!” holidays. They wanted to get off the beaten track, she said, to experience the real culture that these countries had to offer, which is why they insisted on exclusively booking themselves onto off-the-beaten-track coach tours with forty or so other like-minded, culturally aware tourists. Authenticity was important to them; she’d ridden an elephant for God’s sake, huge sweat rings in the armpits of her blouse in the brutal Sri Lankan heat. She told the story most weeks, illustrated with countless badly composed photographs, about how she suffered from food poisoning or maybe just sun stroke and shat liquid for a constant run of eight hours, sobbing by the end and washing her arse in the sink, her husband asleep in the room next door and dreaming of immense spiders.

his bicycle the entranceway (cycloerotic reveries)

He pumped them pedals real proper the both of them, little calves bulging like bagged squeezed bread guts, the wind in his face made his hooter tickle, eyes streamed tears like a sorrowful babe, oh it were good to be alivealiveoh, his dickhead on his shorts front was delicious with the pot holes some little gentle pressures; he wished to disrobe and scream through the fields and industrial estates with his saddle nestled in his crack like a resting beast, bare himself to all and sundry, the summer wind on his hard teats, and the throb of his muscles roasted brilliant and blood surged and with it the oxygen and he felt very alive, mighty, and called to all the middle aged bints he passed lest one should swallow his offer whole and bed him to bits, grateful for whatever he had left for their titties and slices and othersuch anatomicals, purveyor of lust and the self-made motions of the casual rider, cheap jersey a sweaty heap that whiffed his bag out, he saw tights and painted nails and bit fat buttocks flashing before him like life, his life, rode close enough to smell their soap flakes, tang of bra straps, wholesome smells, yeasty, fungal, to hear their phonecalls, he adored the middle aged, past as they would be the arid carnal rut of one’s 30s or the tedious self-consciousness of younger and into the seedy nighttime realms of needy-rumpy-pumpy-plenty pouring forth like a running bath, ready to do a sick call to bosses or underlings for a solid session of attentive perversion, and he plotting the narratives of their lives through their displayed paraphernalia alone as he drove at and into it, cooked like confit in their essential oils, trailing them in silence to their residences, a gestural relation in exclusivity from first winked offer to final humped milking, luxuriating in the hotshot pressure of their showers, soiling their immaculate linens, pocketing their non-perishable food items, and my goodness they would weep for their slight memories of his methodology, Santa of the sexual, he was!, he was!, proficient, organised, committed, insightful, generous, cunning, violent, eccentric, merciful, adept, deft, rhythmical, bananas, oh what a listener!, oh what a male!, in revelry he pumped and pedalled, pedalled them pedals, legs like kebabs, his bicycle the entranceway to the cunt of the world.

the porters' lodge

The college porters gathered en masse Tuesday nights post-ten for raucous pursuits of an intimate nature. In the dull light of the lodge they bared their backs to each other and dealt deck after deck of cards in games of staggering complexity and whose rules not a single one of them knew in even the vaguest sense and which continued through the frenzied and random momentum of the game alone, the cards answerable to nil but their own continued movement. They drank college wine from deep in the stores and got wild on it, kneading and gnawing the varied fleshes of the handful of lady porters who took to all fours and crawled the room evocatively like the mammals they were, their pocked doughy arses and genitalia in burgundy the source of great intrigue as they toiled past institutional furniture clutching glasses and smoking heavily, their knees raw from the coarse shag of the carpet tiles, cheeks ever reddening beneath glassy eyes, ladies who stripped of blue uniform trousers and heavy soled shoes were middle aged and nubile and profoundly accommodating to the weekly adulterous desires of their male colleagues, their hard faces softened by the lamplight over which a college flag had been carefully draped. The ten, twelve male porters that formed any one such occasion would wrestle, the balls of one in the hand or armpit or neckline of another, would grunt and thrust and pump and pulse, and feel the sticky spilt wine upon the hair of their chest and pubis, and collapse breathless and spent in unruly embrace with headaches of sheer thrill. It climaxed with ritual, the women taking leave and a lone male porter entered by the rest, and all fought hard to be the recipient of the ancient will of the college that for these very rituals took genital form. By midnight the revelry was over and the porters returned to their duties or to their homes as was the custom, the lodge left immaculate in their wake, the cards secreted once more.

conversation 779.68

Yeah, it was amazing, yeah. I would. No, I would. I'd love to go and live there but I can't. I'm not young enough. Ha ha. Yeah. No I haven't got any skills and I haven't got any money. If you've got money they'll let you in. Ha ha. No I haven't. I haven't got any money. Yeah. Once in a lifetime. No, and no one wants to marry me. Ha ha.

slowater-next-wensum

By the river that barely ran - although they called it tidal most agreed HARDLY! CUNT’S STILL AS A POND! - they stood in strained silence and passed the drink between them and brushed the tips of their fingers slightly when they passed it and felt incredible excitement as they did so. The still water was fetid in odour and thick with scum, bread wrappers and tin cans amidst submerged clouds of silt. The only sound was of heavy traffic which intensified their desire, the revved engines and hot aggression aphrodisiacal in its proximity, as though they were bit parts in someone else’s choreographed sex scene. He swallowed the last drops and threw the bottle into the middle of the river.

“Probably shouldn’t have,” she said, cupping one hand to his arse.

“I know really,” he said, quite ready in his balls.

In time the sun would drop below the warehouses and industrial premises behind the thin line of part-felled trees on the opposite bank and he would lead her beneath the thick foliage of the single willow and eke her trousers down an inch or so beneath the horizon of her buttocks and bend her barely forwards and fuck her urgently and very afraid only feet from the voices that rose like memories from the landscape, but for then they watched the bottle sink where it landed, the river too still to carry it off.