He wails softly and snuggles against me, burrowing into my hair. I can feel his lips brushing my neck, his hot breath, his five o’clock stubble, and three in the morning must be a barman’s five o’clock. This tired and heavy body feels strangely familiar. It’s nicely familiar to be holding a man. His breath becomes more regular and I become aware that his fingers have penetrated slightly under the hem of my dress and are moving upwards at an imperceptible pace with each of his breaths.
‘I just wanted,’ he murmurs, ‘for you girls to have the best night ever.’
‘I told you: we had a great time.’
‘Are you, though?’
‘I am.’
He pushes my soggy underwear to the side and begins touching me. I let out a sigh.
‘Then tell me,’ he says.
‘What?’ I say.
‘You’re having the best night ever.’
He is relentless. He must have been a popular boy in school or friends with popular boys. The only thing teenage boys will ever get right is that persistence pays off. Clearly this isn’t the kind of man who gives up easily. Fail, fail again, fail better.
‘I’m having the best night ever,’ I say.
‘Tell me again.’
‘I’m having the best night ever.’
The repetitive movement continues, and it is pleasing. The inside of his arm against my cheek is cool, and smooth. I give up and I come.
He struts back to the table with his arm around my shoulders. I’m feeling utterly tired in that way you do after an orgasm when sleep overcomes you completely. The way that he holds me feels impersonal. He could be carrying a watermelon or a baguette under his arm. The lights are on. The girls have gone. The twin boys are stacking cocktail glasses. They look younger in this light. They look up at us.
‘All right now, boys,’ says Stuart Brandon Pierce. ‘Who’s the Best Mixologist in the World?’
He runs his thumb lightly across my arse. My heels feel heavy in my hand. The boys cheer and exchange high fives, low fives. I leave.
I pull the key out of the lock and shut the door to the flat behind me. I pause for a minute with my back against the door. I hook one big toe on the back of each foldable pump and slide them off my feet. I wiggle my toes. I double lock the door and find the packet of cigarettes in the bottom of my handbag. There is one left. I stick it in my mouth, my lips furry around the filter. I lock the door and leave the key in there because no one else needs to come back to this flat tonight.
No one’s ever been allowed to smoke in this flat. I light up the cigarette. I feel sweaty and terrible and exhilarated. I feel exhausted. In the bathroom I sit on the toilet lid and unroll my hold-ups, squeezing the cigarette between my teeth, silicon glue squeaking against my thighs. I tie the hold-ups together and open my new laundry basket. I pull off my dress, panties and bra, add them to the basket too. I notice that it is half empty. I’ve been keeping on top of the laundry. I’m so much better at keeping on top of the laundry these days. I go to bed naked and unwashed.
I slip into a black sleep. There are no dreams, only a bright light I know I must follow, soaring white and fast and wild.
PULSES
Neil
The Night Before the Break-up
When I wake up, I can’t remember it all, not straight away, but I recognize the fear, immediately. The same panic, black and gluey. The horror. The excitement. And I can’t quite explain this, but a part of me almost welcomes it. In the darkness, I pick out the outline of Ruth’s body next to mine. When she sleeps, sometimes it is hard not to admit it: things have been bad between us for a while. And this seals it.
The first time it happened I was fifteen and two months and one week. I still slept in my childhood bed. I’d bought a calendar to count down to my next birthday and I remember turning a page that day. I’ve always found it depressing that my birthday is in December, so close to Christmas. It’s no way to party. As a kid I tried to keep it exciting by crossing off each day with a red marker pen, but by spring I’d always given up, grown deflated. Looking back, I realize that even then I thought of happiness as a distant thing, always out of reach. That’s a lousy personality trait, isn’t it? But big news: you don’t get to choose your personality.
The 1994 calendar had cars on it. All my friends in school had ones with naked ladies, but a more risqué calendar would’ve upset my mother and I didn’t feel like buying one, anyway. It wasn’t that I lacked the guts to do it, but that I couldn’t stand people looking down on me, not even back then. I fucking hate being laughed at. Why would I put myself through that ordeal at the newsagent?
That night, when I opened my eyes into the black room, the front lights of the Bugatti on my calendar sliced the wall across my bedroom, as it spun around itself in mad circles. The noises from the motorway, one mile down the road, spilled through the curtains like someone was turning the volume up and down. I couldn’t move. I felt nauseous in a way that as an adult I have come to associate with a particularly bad hangover: vomit sloshing in the pit of my stomach. I looked up at the ceiling, hoping to find stillness there that matched my pinned body, but I found it was covered in neon signs, thick fluorescent gel travelling round in their glass tubes like a bloodstream. I considered that the liquid might really be blood and as soon as I formulated that thought I became sure that it really was.
I could hear the neon static crackling. I thought that I could see the heat from my body travelling upwards and condensing against the glass surface, as though the blood inside was impossibly cold. I heard the steam turn into water and drip back down on to the mattress holding my dead body. I don’t remember how long I lay like that or when I slipped back into sleep.
When I woke up the room was filled with grey light. I tried to move an arm and it responded to the instruction. I was really awake. I ran my hands down my legs and arms. They were dry. The bed sheets stiff. I had been asleep for hours, and my sweat had congealed in a white patch. I looked at the ceiling: it was the same egg blue it had always been, washed out in the breaking light. The black Bugatti marked the month of March, its custom tyres aggressively pushing at the corner of the image. The whole room was quiet and I was hard.
The feeling of having lived through something dark wasn’t unlike excitement. The visions became increasingly disturbing that year and even more so throughout my teens, more intricate too. From the age of fifteen to eighteen, the night paralysis kept coming back. I learnt how to recognize an attack, but it didn’t make me any better at dealing with it. I didn’t improve with time or with practice and it was all rather disruptive.
I’d barely paid attention to girls before. I remember this was a conscious choice; I was always very self-conscious. One of my mother’s favourite memories was the one of the nosy neighbour next door asking me: ‘Do you have a girlfriend?’ I was three. I was playing with wooden cubes in the sandbox at the back of the garden. Without lifting my head, I responded, ‘I am busy.’ My mother liked to recall this memory as a sort of cautionary tale and brought it up often during my teens. So for a long time, since girls weren’t spontaneously paying attention to me, and I was equally unwilling to go after them, I really did believe that I was destined to save myself for better things. Until the sleep paralysis started. At least, I think that’s what it was. It made me feel restless. It was puberty, but it wasn’t just that. It felt like a very specific need. A need I didn’t have a name for, but which was a very strong one for sure.
The experience renewed itself each time, never losing its intensity. I jolted up from the blackout that returned me to myself after the paralysis, sitting stiffly in bed, my body throbbing with its own blood. I put myself under the steaming jet of the shower, scalding water lashing me across the back in wide red strokes. I knew with complete clarity what it was that I needed: I needed to push myself immediately into or through another being, crash into another body. It was a kind of hunger and I was so, so hungry. I was hungry for breaking into something, yes, but it was the ac
t of breaking that mattered most. I needed to snap back into my own shape after my horror. I thought about this while I touched myself in the scorching hot water, punishing myself for my impure thoughts, though technically also indulging them.
At fifteen I no longer observed my mother’s constellation of sins, but I still figured that wanting to hurt someone was a fucked-up thing to want, regardless of one’s religious inclinations. I was too naive then, of course, to imagine that some people may wilfully seek to be hurt as a means to achieve pleasure. I thought that hurting would, well, hurt, and who wants that? So I crushed my urges, my chest pressed against the shower tiles, just in case my mother opened the door while I was in there.
Afterwards, I spent a long time cleaning myself.
I began to notice girls in a different way, much like other fifteen-year-old boys, I suppose, but for me it happened suddenly, after the hallucinations began. It was as though all the girls I knew had suddenly come into focus. I didn’t initially connect the things that aroused me in my disordered sleep and the bodies of my classmates, because what happened during the night didn’t really belong to my waking life. My brain diverted my attention to localized detail. I don’t remember the names of the girls in my school, but I remember liking the curve of an ankle that belonged to a girl who always wore frilly socks folded over her school shoes. I was fascinated by girls’ joints. I liked their knees under tables, especially when they were eager to stop wearing tights in the spring, when it was still a little too cold and the skin on their legs turned purple and grainy. During the volleyball tournament, I watched girls fall to their knees for a save. I wanted to slip my index finger in the crook of the middle hitter’s elbow – I have no memory of her face, but I remember she had long, sand-coloured limbs – and press the sinew under the skin until I held the rope of her muscle. I wanted to pull her to me, forcing her elbow on to my shoulder, her head against my chest so she would have to look up into my eyes. I liked watching girls when they put their hair up in ponytails, which at the time were very fashionable. I lay on my bed at night as the wallpaper swirled into night flowers, the black Bugatti humming angrily from its frame, and woke up feeling like I hadn’t rested at all. I lost a stone in three months.
One night in June I opened my eyes to a figure in a top hat sitting at the edge of my bed. He began turning his head to face me, very slowly, and I felt extremely afraid. I could sense that the man was about to speak. I knew that what he had to say was extremely important and would bring about some kind of resolution. The feeling of dread increased as I waited to see his face and time stood still as the black fear clutched at my chest, and I waited, and waited, until I was sure my heart was about to give out, until I realized that there was no face, though the head kept slowly revolving on its hinge.
In the morning my chest stung like it’d been wound in barbed wire. My penis was so hard it hurt. I showered. I composed myself, put on my school uniform and took myself to the library to do some research. I have always liked to learn things: it is only once you’ve learnt everything about a subject that you can say you’ve truly mastered it.
There was no mention anywhere of sexual arousal occurring as a consequence of sleep paralysis, but I figured that if a correlation existed I wouldn’t find it in the kind of books they kept in the school library. In any case, the fact that I had made the connection and now was seeking confirmation of it through secondary reading meant that my sexuality was already shaping itself from those lucid nightmares. Until then, I’d thought of sex in an abstract way and figured out in my head which positions would prove most efficient. It’d seemed to me that a lot about sex wasn’t immediately obvious, but I didn’t feel any rush to find out. Now, I had suddenly become impatient, my whole body feverish each morning. Whatever it was, sex needed to happen soon. The school term was almost over and I thought that this might be my last chance. It was time for me to take action.
I lost my virginity easily and to a girl called Roxy. She wasn’t a virgin. I didn’t care. It made things better. I knew that Roxy wasn’t only sleeping with me. She slept with everyone – or that was what everyone said. It didn’t matter so long as she would do it with me, which she dutifully did. All I had to do was ask. In bed she was disciplined, despite her experience, or maybe because of it. She was surprisingly pliable. She handed her body over as though she fancied stepping out of it and I could borrow it until she needed it back. When I roughed her up she went slack and pink, her white chocolate bob all scuffed, bottom lip out of axis, like a sweet posh horse. The third time we did it, she asked me to slap her, so I did what she wanted. The crack of my palm as it made contact with her cheek returned me to my body.
After that, the paralysis stopped completely. Three months of complete bliss. The next autumn, Roxy joined the young cadets. She died in Afghanistan a few years later. It made the national papers and when I read the obituary I smiled, thinking of her fondly. She’d never mentioned wanting to join the army during the brief time we had been together, but in my head it made perfect sense. You might say my sexual initiation was a paradigmatic experience. I will always be grateful to Roxy: she was a girl who put her body on the line. Just my type.
It happened again, many years later. 2007: the year my mother died. It was the night after the funeral and Ruth had come back to my childhood flat with me. That was the only time I would take her, because I sold the flat shortly afterwards, and shortly after that they turned the building into a bingo palace. The life of the city ticks on at its own pace.
Ruth and I had been together a year. Things were better, the best they’d ever been for me. I think that was the closest I’ve ever come to real happiness. She was my angel, my quintessential girl. It took me years of looking for the perfect girl, months of looking at her from a distance before I could call her mine. She drove me fucking crazy. The way there was always more room within her, like she had infinite depth.
The first time we made love I threw myself into her completely, and she welcomed me, whole. I never felt the need to push things much further in bed, like I had with Roxy and the others. I didn’t need to squeeze her or slap her or pull on her hair. With Ruth, these rituals of power felt obsolete. There was no doubt that she was all mine, my girlfriend: I’d never been so attracted to a girl before. Sometimes, when I watched her sleep, shut off from the world, her body felt like a substance heavier than water, a greenish-black oil, that exerted its own kind of gravity. I couldn’t stop touching her. I was in love with all the textures of her body, the way her narrow bones were close to the surface. At night the presence of her small darkness was enough to ward off greater evils. Ruth was the medicine: my vaccine, my reminder of where the boundaries lay. With her by my side, I thought I’d never need to sink into that great black again, would never emerge wanting to kill something, if only a little bit.
I had never shared my childhood bed with anyone. My mother wouldn’t allow it. The funeral had been a small affair but the paperwork afterwards took longer than expected and we both felt too tired to travel back home. We made the sensible decision to stay overnight and, though I had a bad feeling about it, I assumed this was normal. My mother had just died, after all. I didn’t have it in me to move into the master bedroom where she had slept – I’d rarely been allowed in there as a child and I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d be doing something wrong by going in without asking. Even though there was now no one left to ask. Ruth mistook my hesitation for fresh grief and guided me by the hand to my old bedroom. She’d never been there before but she figured out the way. I followed her. The thing about my type of girl – and Ruth’s so my type – is that they can make you do anything they want you to. That night Ruth wanted me to fuck her and found a way to get what she wanted. She didn’t ask; she just didn’t leave me any choice. When I saw her in her white underwear, her slender frame white on my old floral bed cover, I had no choice but to have her.
We did it in the single bed with the flannel sheets rubbing my knees raw. I gave into
her and felt her body flat against the mattress. I held her neck and she let her throat go slack like the stem of a flower. I pressed my fingers in until I found her pulse. I hated her then for what she was making me do. My mother had been dead forty-eight hours. But after it was over and I looked at her helpless face, so open and vulnerable, I felt myself warm to her again. She must’ve thought this was a way to make me feel better. Bless her. We fell asleep pressed against each other, like we do now, every night.
But when I awoke in my dead body, I couldn’t find Ruth’s small weight next to me. The bed had collapsed beneath us. I wanted to turn my head but my neck stuck. The sleep paralysis was back.
I looked up, moved my eyes from right to left. The room was painted a murky yellow, swirls of green around the edges, stretching, slowly, as I watched them, and meeting at the centre of the ceiling. Then the walls began to lose consistency, to wobble and melt, sliding down the swirls like stewed meat off a bone. They dropped off completely and I realized that the darker stripes were metal bars, held together by a circular railing at the top, like an aviary. The steel looked green against the sulphuric sky and I could hear the muttering, somewhere, of birds stirring. The more I listened, the more alien the noises sounded, and I began to think that these animals could only inhabit a world very different from ours. I understood then that my sleeping body must have travelled to a planet unfit for human beings, which explained the mustard-yellow sky outside the cage. In the distance, I spotted a pale moon, then another. This was wrong and I felt the panic rise like bile in my mouth. The humming escalated as the planet woke to a new day and my chest folded in on itself. I couldn’t breathe.
I woke up, covered in sweat, really awake. I ran to the toilet, I had to get away from Ruth. I masturbated in the house of my dead mother. I cried with my forehead pressed against the tiles. I hate crying, so it offered no relief. My own tears filled me with a sodden kind of disgust. How could Ruth have let this happen? I thought that I could be completely safe with her. I felt alone in the world and I said to myself, eventually, you will find freedom in having no family at all. A man must learn to thrive in loneliness. These were the kinds of thoughts with which I comforted myself as a young man. I did have Ruth. But could I trust her completely, now she’d failed me when I’d needed her most?
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