Wildlife

by Joe Stretch

  Minds are not empty. That’s exactly the problem. Minds are crammed and detailed. The individual is a dropped vase. I’m so complex, it’s disgusting, thinks Anka, eyes shut, picturing the wankers typing with fast fingertips. We are becoming very technical. The humans, she means. Skins and veins pulled into shapes. A cool identity for every square inch of organ, pipe and blood. We are things, detailed and unique, we must love ourselves. That’s the trick, thinks Anka. Have time. Be complex. Fuck yourself. Tenderly.

  Anka is approaching orgasm. She is remembering the descriptions. She is imagining the moments the descriptions describe. She can’t fight the urge any longer. She climaxes. She is thinking. I love you. You are beautiful. I love you. Feed yourself.

  7

  AFTER THREE DAYS of constant shagging in the Columbia Hotel near Hyde Park, Life left Janek Freeman playing bass guitar alone in the devastated bed. He’d received a phone call from his aunt Sophie telling him that his mum was dead. He told Life about his mother’s breathlessness and about her very shallow lungs. Life got a bit depressed and decided to leave.

  ‘It’s a bit too soon,’ said Life before she left. ‘I feel a bit guilty about Joe.’

  This seemed a bit rich to Janek and even a little heartless, however breathless and doomed his mother might have been. She’d just died. And it seemed a little late in the day for Life to be feeling sorry for the ex-boyfriend with the bottom complex. And after all, things were starting to matter. My life the Fuck Festival. My brilliant life the Fuck Festival.

  But nevertheless Janek was polite. He didn’t kick up a fuss. Nothing matters again, he reasons in the bed. Mum is dead. Life is feeling guilty about her ex-boyfriend who, so she says, tried to build a nest in her arse. Nothing matters. Janek had told Life that he understood. They exchanged numbers and then had distracted sex before she finally walked out of the room.

  Janek lies on the sheetless mattress playing chords on his bass, thinking about his poor mum. You need to have a neat technique to play chords on a bass. You need to have strong fingers and tough skin. The sound you create is strange, somehow unmusical.

  ‘Poor Mum,’ he murmurs. ‘Oh dear.’

  It’s been four days since Janek met Life at Reel World Studio. His bass guitar was plugged into an amplifier. A signal from this amplifier was plugged into a neuro-monitoring unit. A wire ran from the neuro-monitoring unit to a contraption that Life wore like a hat. Her wavy gold hair flowed from the machinery. The bossbitch from the Wild World was searching for the A-HA moment.

  The A-HA moment is discovered early in the twenty-first century. It relates to certain activities in the roof of the brain, caused when certain words and certain music are combined together perfectly. Advertisers discovered that if you could generate an A-HA moment during an advert, you were virtually guaranteed to sell a product. They researched the moment when a brand is identified, understood and desired and called it the A-HA moment. It’s hard to predict. But with the right technology, we can now detail such irrational instances of desire. The scruffs from the Wild World are convinced that bass lines are the key to unlocking it.

  Janek was instructed by Bossbitch to play all sorts of different genres of bass line into Life’s brain. Jazz. Rock. Hip hop. R ’n’ B. Meanwhile, boards with different coloured text on them were held up for Life to stare at while she listened. They searched all day for the A-HA moment. Life stared at the word ‘LOVE’ as Janek drilled his bass in an array of styles. Nothing happened. Life stared at the word ‘BEAUTY’. Janek plucked. Nothing happened. Word after word. ‘SEX’, ‘COOL’, ‘DREAM’, ‘FUTURE’. Fuck all. Nothing like an AHA. Finally, they tried the word ‘LIFE’. Janek started moving through the styles. First rock, then hip hop, then R ’n’ B. Nothing. Then he tried funk. He slapped his way through the funkiest of bass lines and Life’s brain went crazy.

  ‘A-HA,’ cried the guys at the neuro-monitor. ‘Got it!’

  Bossbitch looked confused. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘All right, Janek. Stop playing. I need to think.’

  Life smiled as Janek flicked a subtle V at Bossbitch. Life hadn’t been aware of her brain’s radically different response to the FUNK/LIFE combination. But nevertheless she accepted the fact that her brain had gone wild.

  ‘What do you reckon?’ Bossbitch asked. ‘Funky life? Is that what people want? Or is she just reacting to staring at her own name?’

  Janek smirked. This seemed remarkably unscientific. Guesswork, really. Nothing matters, he remembered. It’s amazing.

  Bossbitch took the grey machinery from off Life’s head and knelt down beside her.

  ‘Answer me this,’ Bossbitch said. ‘Do you like “life”? I mean, were you thinking about the world, being alive and stuff, or were you just thinking about yourself, you know, your own name, who you are?’

  Life wasn’t sure. She restyled her hair with her fingers and said, ‘Hard to say.’

  Bossbitch got angry. ‘This is important! This is my job! Which do you prefer, being Life or living life?’

  Put like that, it was obvious to everyone present what the answer was. Life is a mighty, beautiful young girl with a zest for sex and having fun. Life, on the other hand, the breathing, living, dying life, I mean, is notoriously shit. The session ended. Bossbitch was frustrated. Janek and Life got the train from Bath Spa to London and had sex in the small toilet at the end of their carriage. Bath Spa, Chippenham, Swindon, Fuck Festival! Janek could suddenly see a way forward. A magical place beyond the cities and the fields, the shops, the streets, the web and the tedious grapple with twenty-four-hour after twenty-four-hour. The Fuck Festival: a distant land of love and sex where nothing matters in the most perfect way. Janek felt like he was on his way.

  Back in the hotel room, Janek is preparing to leave. Jews bury each other quickly and his aunt Sophie wants him back in Bristol by this afternoon.

  Before she left, he and Life arranged to meet in Wow-Bang during the week. The Real Arms. For Janek, the idea of meeting Life in a virtual world is a little distressing. A virtual world strikes him as even more awkward, embarrassing and difficult to be in than this one. But who truly knows the way to the Fuck Festival?

  It was a psychotherapist called Melanie who had told Janek, at the age of six, to learn to play a musical instrument. Music, she told the young man, will help you bridge the gap between yourself and the world around you. Janek agreed. ‘Will it make stuff fun?’ he asked, in an unbroken voice. ‘Yes,’ his psychotherapist had replied. ‘It should do.’ So Janek dutifully borrowed his father’s bass guitar and practised every day for hours. He performed midday concerts for his breathless mother and entertained her fully. It worked. I suppose it worked. Nothing matters, sure, but Janek has led a fairly decent life. Bass nerds all over the world worship him and attempt to emulate his playing technique. American rap stars touch fists with him when they meet and offer him gifts of diamond-encrusted crucifixes. Janek pulls his beanie down over his head and constantly survives.

  Until the glut of sex he’s just had with Life, Janek’s had an indifferent relationship with intercourse. He attributes this, and his general sense of apathy and detachment, to the circumcision of his penis at the age of zero. Eight days into his life, the operation was performed without anaesthetic. People think the baby doesn’t give a shit. This, thinks Janek, is bollocks. Janek recalls an invisible and silent trauma. He remembers shock. He remembers being comatose. Janek believes the removal of his foreskin has left a negative imprint on his brain. He feels he was painfully robbed of the small flesh interface that would have helped him connect to the world of touch. He feels like the link between his innards and the air has been severed.

  A couple of years ago in California he got a blow job off his cellist girlfriend, Judy. She closed her eyes and Janek had never felt so alone. It felt like an unnecessarily sexual form of waiting. But with Life it was different. Life doesn’t have sex. She does sex. As long as they were sweating and panting, moving in and out of each other, it seemed she was
overjoyed and satisfied. This attitude rubbed off on Janek. Sex didn’t feel like such a quest. Just fuck. Now keep fucking. The festival is coming to a city near you.

  Back in the hotel room, Janek is packing his suitcase. Beside it lies a blue duffel bag that Life left behind for him. It’s some sort of Wild World goodie bag and there are few things more depressing than a goodie bag. One day you will saunter into a cool hell, the walls all finally burnt; you’ll be greeted by a bending devil and a bulging goodie bag. ‘Great,’ you’ll say.

  Janek shuts his suitcase with a click. He looks into the goodie bag and pulls out an MP3 player. It’s tiny. The size of a coin. It’s bright red. Small black lettering reads ‘N-Prang’. Other than the N-Prang, the bag contains a Wild World make-up case and some stickers. One sticker reads ‘I AM WILD WORLD’.

  It’s another bright winter’s day. Light reflects off the cars and off the white-brick buildings of Lancaster Gate. Janek crosses Bayswater Road and walks into Hyde Park. He takes a copy of the London Paper from a small man with a hidden face and a puffy, dirty yellow coat.

  On the front page of the London Paper there is a picture of Asa Gunn. ‘Reality-TV star Asa Gunn has retired, citing certain complications involving the Wild World.’ On page 5 the story continues with the popular feature ‘Five Questions for . . .’

  Hello, Asa. Do you think you’ll be remembered?

  (Long pause) Yes. But not for my songs or my reality-TV days. For something else.

  Do you regret the decision to abandon your theatrical debut?

  (He appears to be in tears) I’m not in a position to talk about regrets.

  What’s next for Asa Gunn?

  (Still weeping) From among us, a Dickhead will rise. At the end of our time, this Dickhead will come to us, armed with our future.

  Fair enough and, so, what exactly is the Wild World, any ideas?

  The Wild World is a revolution.

  Who do you most admire?

  Joan Rivers.

  Underneath the interview a statement reads, ‘A spokesman on behalf of the Wild World today refuted the suggestion that the Wild World is in any way connected to the tactic of revolution.’

  Janek dumps the newspaper in a bin and walks across the squeaky wet grass to the shores of the Serpentine.

  Swans call out to the sky. Janek thinks back to Peter Gabriel and the swan at Reel World. He remembers the sound the neuro-monitor made when he played funk bass into Life’s brain. The sound of the A-HA moment. Having spent three days in bed with Life, Janek is confident her brain had grown excited because it recognised itself in the word ‘LIFE’. It wasn’t love of existence. If I had Life’s confidence, he thinks, her ability to affect her surroundings and have fun, then my brain would probably go apeshit over the word ‘JANEK’. As it is, Janek can imagine his brain hunching both of its shoulders at the sight of his name, unfolding its white pipes like arms and raising them into a questioning gesture, as if to say, So what?

  Janek walks along the water’s edge, suitcase in one hand, bass case in the other, beanie on his head. Naturally slightly bored, he sets down his suitcase for a second and feeds the red earphones of the N-Prang into his ears. Janek dislikes the realism of the whispering wind and the squawks of swans that it carries. He wonders what music the Wild World has to offer. Probably music made by bands full of brightly dressed kids who like the idea of living.

  But Janek quickly finds that the music of the N-Prang is bass-heavy. He flicks through the first few tracks and finds only huge deep bass notes, held into place by kick-drum, hi-hat and snare. His footsteps fall quickly into the rhythm of the N-Prang and he’s puzzled to find himself marching round the Serpentine at a fair old speed. On the far shore he can see elderly men and women in pink wetsuits diving into a cordoned-off section of the lake. The waves begin to dance. The trees around Hyde Park hold hands, shake their heads and begin to sway.

  Walking with the music, Janek feels strange. He feels like he’s biting happily on a brick. The song of the N-Prang enters a breakdown: higher bass notes stretched long under a shimmering string section. Janek glides past a bench. A group of kids in matching white hoodies greet Janek with playful finger pistols. Janek smiles. One boy mounts the back of the bench and leaps off, performing three or four somersaults before hitting the ground, pulling his hood up and pirouetting quickly with one finger held against his lips. The song of the N-Prang kicks back in. The kids dance as Janek walks on, each of them, even the girls, gripping their crotches.

  There’s a very old man, wearing a flat cap, a tweed jacket and with a pipe puffing bubbles between his lips. This man has skin like Bible paper. The man begins to break-dance as Janek walks by. He is spinning on his flat-capped head, unsupported by his hands and with his legs thrust into the blue sky like those of a frog. Bubbles continue to blow from the man’s pipe. Large bubbles float into the cold winter air and then burst.

  Two women push pushchairs and really work their backsides for the pleasure of Janek’s eyes. Great booty, thinks Janek, still striding like a smooth, impossibly cool young man en route to a Fuck Festival. Did I think the word booty? I did. And I’m right. Both women bend extremely into their pushchairs, exposing large denim behinds that bubble along to the grooves of the N-Prang. As he passes by, Janek glances into the pushchairs and notices that both babies are crying with joy.

  The swimming of the elderly in the freezing lake is entirely synchronised. Janek arrives and watches as a dozen pairs of pink-wetsuited legs rise up from the murky Serpentine and dance in unison in a hip-hop style. Twenty-four pink knees bend in fashionable, robotic jerks that are difficult to pull off in music videos, let alone when you’re old and you’re holding your breath under ice-cold water. Janek stares in disbelief. This is what he loves about London. The way little communities like this come together and battle against the anonymity of the city with well-practised and flamboyant skills. Behind him, ten swans march in single file, all their white wings spread wide like Nazi eagles. It’s funny, thinks Janek, standing at the water’s edge, wondering when the swimmers will resurface.

  After some time, the solitary head of an elderly man rises out of the dark water, then his pink-wetsuited shoulders, then his waist, then his legs. The man, it turns out, is standing on a woman’s shoulders, she’s now rising out of the water, too, lifting the guy even higher. And, of course, she’s standing on top of someone else. Now they’re rising. So it continues, elderly swimmer after elderly swimmer rising out of the water with their feet gripping the shoulders of the person under them until the first man is very high up and Janek is clapping in astonishment. Clapping claps he can’t hear because of the bass-heavy music in his ears. But clapping claps anyway. Because this is amazing.

  He takes the earphones of the N-Prang from his ears. He turns to the row of swans. They are pecking at the tarmac ground now. Or hissing. Or beating their large wings for no apparent reason. In the water, the elderly swimmers have begun to lower themselves safely back down. When the first man is back in the water all the swimmers gather round him, some gasping, some smiling, congratulating each other on the success of their performance. They are treading water and exhilarated. Janek is passed by the two women with the pushchairs. Over the tears of their babies, they are talking about Asa Gunn. One declares that no matter what, they still believe that he is a superstar.

  Are these signposts? I feel happy. The drugged lions, the sawdust air and the nervous clowns. Are these the well-trained elephants of the Fuck Festival?

  At the end of their world tour, Snoop Dogg placed a hand on Janek’s forehead and asked if he was OK. Snoop said that he’d never seen someone have so little fun, even growing up in Long Beach. Janek had agreed, saying, ‘It’s odd, isn’t it, Snoop?’

  But Life is a better fun-haver than Snoop. Oh, Life. Fucking fun. Funny fucking. Fucking funny. Death. When they had sex, when they did it, Life made both of them crane their necks to stare at the penis and the vagina. ‘Watch it go in and out,’ Life cried. And the
y did. She and Janek stared at their interacting sexes until they felt distanced from them and entertained by the performance. They stared at their bodies like they were pieces of miraculous evidence. For the first time in his life, Janek was able to forget about his circumcision during sex. Such sensory concerns were secondary. Just stare at the proof. We live. Inside and outside.

  Once his mum is safely buried, Janek decides he will meet Life in the virtual city of Wow-Bang. He decides that he will try to begin a relationship with her. But for now he is in London. He makes his way to Oxford Street where the air is solid with noise until he takes out the N-Prang and switches it on.

  He is striding along with humans on the enormous shopping street. Bass notes in his brain, encouraging his feet. To move. To move. Janek is walking to the groove. The other humans join him. Crotches circle and thrust. Cars begin to bounce on the jammed road. It is cool. Some leap as high as five feet in the air. People shut their mouths and allow their heads to nod to the N-Prang beat. Janek thinks of Life. So funny to imagine happiness. Such a rare and brilliant thing, when you sense it coming.

  8

  Allow me. Allow me. I’m fucking glad that Asa Gunn’s retired. Why? Because I’ve never seen such a muscular mountain of Godshit in all my life. He’s a twat. But he’s right. El Rogerio says, every celebrity is flammable. Strike the match.

  SUBMIT.

  ROGER HART LEAVES his computer and goes to the door of his flat. He’d listened while the postman knocked. Through the screams of his recorded message he’d heard the postman slating him to the girl who lives opposite. He’d heard her take the piss out of his taste in music, too. Simple bitch. He’s never met her. Never wants to. Why don’t young people see the beauty of musicals? People think musicals are cheesy. People are cheesy, thinks Roger. Musicals are cool.