Ugly Things

by Mark Yarwood

  Now I’m the star. I’m not ready for my close up, but I’m doing it and Janet’s filming. I don’t care that there is a camera in my face, or pointing down at my crotch, I just keep on thrusting.

  When you’re a salesman, you’re never really selling the product. What you’re doing is selling yourself. In this case, that will be exactly what we are doing.

  ‘Forget about me and the camera,’ Janet says. ‘Just go with the flow. Really get into it.’

  I’ve never felt so alive. I feel beautiful. Me and Jenny, doing this act, we are the most beautiful creatures in the universe. They should put us on a map- The Map. Objects of interests, sites of historical importance. Don’t bother to see the Grand Canyon. Don’t throw away your money in Vegas. Why see a huge erection in New York, when you can see one right here?

  ‘Now, Jenny, you get on all fours,’ Janet commands. ‘And you…you know what to do.’

  And we do as we are told. Jenny puts her hands flat against the wall as I grab her hips and push my soldier into her. She lets out a burst of breath every time I ram into her. Janet fumbles backwards, falling over the clothes across the floor, trying to get us both in shot. ‘That’s fantastic. This is art. You’re both stars. Now all it needs is the finishing touch.’

  Janet puts down the camera and comes back with a pot of paint. She uses a spoon to flip open the lid. In one motion she throws the contents of the tin over us. We, Jenny and I, let out a moan when the yellow paint hits us. Janet throws blue paint over us. She throws red, peach and a tin of magnolia and a pot of lilac.

  The sweat pours down my face. After a few minutes, I feel the paint moulding to my body, hardening. Janet comes back with a large piece of white card and presses it against our bodies. She does this several times, getting different angles, making sure she gets it all on film. Documented evidence of our art. Others would call it porn or smut.

  Jenny sounds like she’s enjoying it. But I have to wonder if this art is real or fake. Is this a forgery?

  ‘You’re making art history,’ Janet tells us. ‘You’ll be in books. You’ll have millions and millions of images on the Internet. Instead of those naked pictures of movie stars and supermodels and tennis players, you’ll become the most requested names in search engines. Ever.’

  Janet tells us it’s time to change positions. We should choose. Jenny lies back and wraps her legs over my shoulders, bring her pelvis practically into my face. We go at it again, Janet throwing more paint over us, telling us we are going to be rich and famous. At first, she says, people will try and stop us. Art Nazis, she tells us, will try and ban our work, but that is to be expected. That is, she says, very important. If they don’t try and ban you, then you are doing something wrong, or right, whatever way you want to look at it.

  Jenny is kissing me and all I can taste is emulsion. We are atoms, I tell myself. Molecules. Chemical symbols. The closer you get to us, the more our flesh disappears. Magnify and magnify, you’ll see two lumps of molecules bouncing against each other. A cloud of tiny atoms. As small as I know we are, right now we are giants.

  The moment they accept what we are doing, Janet says, we might as well kill ourselves.

  ‘When our clients see this video, they’ll fall over trying to get their wallets out.’ Janet focuses the camera on my face. ‘They’ll pay thousands for the art we made. You made. We all made.’

  They’ll take home the videos, Janet tells us, and they’ll touch themselves just watching it. You’ll never die, because you’ll live on in their little fantasies. Fantasies are hereditary, Janet says. The paintings will be passed on from generation to generation. One day, you’ll even be on Antiques Road Show.

  Maybe a little bored, Jenny scoops her legs from my shoulders and pushes me backwards. I lie on my back, my hands up as if she’s holding a gun in my face, as she clambers on top of me. She grips my soldier and guides him into his comfort zone.

  ‘If you can perform in front of a camera, you can do this live.’ Janet kicks away a bra that has become attached to her foot. She shakes her foot and swears, until it flies across the room and lands on Jenny’s dressing table.

  ‘Live?’ I ask.

  ‘Yes. They’ll want a live demonstration.’ Janet gets closer, pointing the camera at Jenny’s miniature breasts. They could be Barbie’s breasts. ‘And we’ll give them something to think about. We’ll give them a fantasy to hand down.’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ I say, trying to sit up. Jenny’s clammy hands push me back down. ‘You never said anything about performing in public, in front of an audience.’

  You can fantasise and obsess about having sex in a room with two women, but it’ll never live up to what you expect, especially if one of them is sticking a camera in your face.

  ‘People like to see everything for themselves,’ Janet says. ‘Seeing is believing. That’s why there are still theatres.’

  ‘Good,’ I shout, trying to push Jenny off me. ‘Let them go and see Cats. I’m not a performing dog.’

  Right then, I’m remembering being at school, sitting in class and watching two dogs copulating on the football field right in front of us. It was our first vision of sex and none of us could take our eyes off this act. Two dogs doing doggy style. Maybe they don’t have any sense of privacy or dignity, but I do. That’s what I tell Janet, but she just laughs.

  This camera, she says, has a live feed to the Internet. She shows me the cable snaking out of the room.

  ‘You just lost your dignity,’ she tells me. ‘To thousands of young men and women, you just became a mysterious hero. Think of all the young women looking at you and seeing how beautiful you are.’

  Look at your crotch, she says. I look down. There I am, my soldier still ready for action.

  ‘The difference between a normal run of the mill man and a porn star,’ she tells me, ‘is stage fright.’

  Chapter Eight

  When my eyes are open there’s an old lady staring down at me.

  It used to be like this, before, when I was good looking, when I slept with young women that didn’t know any better. There’d be a house sized chunk of blackness before you wake up and see some woman lying next to you, looking like she was once made up for a night out, but now somehow looks like she’s gone through a car wash without a vehicle.

  I know her name though, the old woman staring at me with her bulging blood shot eyes. She blinks and I see great radish size globs of mascara travel between her eyelashes. Her bright red lipstick is smeared across her left cheek.

  This usually doesn’t happen in such a vulgar manner.

  Usually they’re a mess for about half an hour and then somehow they appear in your shirt and nothing else and their hair hangs sodden, soaking the collar. The regret has usually left the building by then.

  This is a horror film. This is some kind of freak show.

  I know who she is.

  This is Margaret Parks.

  You’re in Margaret Parks’ bed and it’s huge and to your left is a stretch of glass, and through it, you can see the sea crashing against the rocks. How can a man be envious of the sea?

  Margaret Parks was a British film star in the sixties. I remember seeing her movies when I took a film study course years ago. Her first film was a black and white gritty drama, the sort Britain used to do so well back then.

  Some people were made for the black and white screen and others just look dead in monochrome. Margaret Parks, when she first appears in that London market in My Home Is My World in the opening shot, was only thirteen years old. Every man loved her, with her pouts and innocent little eyes. Every man loved her, even though they knew they shouldn’t.

  One afternoon, sick from school or at least pretending to be sick, you sit and watch a matinee film. It comes on and it’s black and white and you yawn. She walks across the screen and you see the close up of her face, the way she always looks as if she was about to cry.

  One morning you wake up and you’re in her bed.

  Like all ot
her things in life when you’re a man, you’re fifty odd years too late.

  You move backwards, feeling the expensive sheets caress your body, still looking in her eyes, trying to smile. You look at your naked body and notice the scratch marks on your chest. You feel a little sore down there like you’ve been sanded between two pieces of dried bark.

  On the bedside table is a condom with a knot tied in it. You blink at it, your confusion growing across your face.

  Margaret Parks smiles and her face creases in so many different places. You can see stretched areas round the ears and the lips look a little inflated. I suddenly recall a dingy my father us to take us sailing in.

  Margaret Parks adjusts her silk nightgown, trying to hide her modesty. She reaches out a hand and caresses my shoulder. I try and keep my shudder minimal.

  ‘You were a…wolf.’ Margaret throws back her head and croaks out a laugh. ‘Want some breakfast?’

  I watch her sit back against the pillows and reach for a cigarette. She looks at me while she lights it, a slight smile on her lips. ‘It was quite a party, wasn’t it?’

  I have the strangest taste in my mouth. For some reason, I recall one of Janet’s sticks of Rock. It reads: Eat me.

  Since I became good looking again, there have been a lot of ladies. Last night I was looking for some more, scouting the party, even though I can’t remember how I got there. Margaret Parks’ party in her post modern house and her rich minor celebrity friends. I remember the celebrity chef Pete Hallow with his annoying twitch and the cast of that police drama Hall Street Nick. Most of all, I picture the glamour models in their designer dresses that look like they were grabbed from the fashion house before the designer had time to finish them.

  ‘You’re Margaret Parks,’ I say feebly.

  She flashes her palms at me, the cigarette ash flying onto the sheets. She gives me a taste of her old film star smile when she had her own teeth. ‘Call me Maggie, darling.’

  Maggie tells me about her dream coming true when she was spotted leaving her posh school one afternoon. Her parents jumped at the chance for their daughter to star in a film and paid for her to have acting lessons. Maggie tells me she was happy when she arrived on set in London. She was told to put on some cockney accent and, of course, she tried her best. But it was her look that they liked so much.

  Action. She walks through the London street closed off for filming. These days they use sound stages, with red telephone boxes stuck on fake street corners. Maybe they’ll travel north and find a quaint square that looks like London used to look.

  Maggie walks down the street wearing a tiny worn dress. She tells me it was red, the colour of the stripes on the American flag.

  Margaret Parks sits up in bed, her bony back pushed against shimmering silver pillows. Her eyes glaze over as she takes a deep lungful from her cigarette. She’s looking into the corner of the room, where an archway leads to an en suite bathroom. ‘I was so happy.’

  I notice then that I’ve been unaware of the lump to her side. In my shocked state, I just thought it was her legs, but now that I look, I can see her legs are tucked up under her.

  If you woke up next to a film star, you’d think you were lucky. I have this weird taste in my mouth and, on any other morning, I’d think I had a kebab or some other kind of fast food item.

  The lump moves and I see a pinnacle stretching upwards, until the sheets fall away and a young man lies there yawning. He blinks and keeps his eyes open. He’s naked body is slender ad white like carved ivory. He stretches and yawns again. Margaret watches him sit up, the sheets slipping off his naked body. He kisses her on the cheek and disappears into the bathroom.

  For a couple of minutes there is silence in the bedroom, and all you can hear is the pouring sound of the young man peeing into the bowl. He stops. He starts again and then flushes. He comes out and waves to us and leaves the room.

  I want to call the police.

  Maggie tells me what a wild party it was and she was so pleased that Michael and I got on so well.

  I don’t remember anything. You find yourself in bed with a movie star and the next thing you know, you’re vomiting into her toilet bowl, thinking this is where he just took a piss.

  Maggie tells me she’ll make breakfast as she stands with one hand on her bony hip, looking down at me as my head hangs over the toilet.

  This is how it works. You’re in a bar or at a party. You have a glass of something on the bar and, when you’re not watching, they pop the pill into your drink and that’s the end of story. Next thing, you’re waking up next to the living dead and her toy boy, Michael.

  Maggie makes breakfast herself and we sit on her balcony, our legs tucked under a wrought iron, gold painted table. I eat my breakfast slowly, the taste of vomit slowly sinking away from me.

  Maggie bites into a piece of toast and tells me about the second week of filming in London. She tells me her father was staying down the hall in some London hotel, while she had a big room to herself. The director lets himself in, telling her he wants to go through some of her lines for the next day.

  She’s still wearing the little red dress and he looks at her strangely. The dress was his idea, she says. He told her she should wear it as much as possible, really feel her character.

  Half- hour later, he’s trying to feel more than her character.

  Maggie calmly smokes as the sea roars up at us and the seagulls dive bomb the balcony. She looks out into the horizon and goes into great detail about the rape. When the film ended, she tells me, she never saw that director again.

  ‘Do you remember seeing a portly gentleman yesterday evening? she asks, looking at me for the first time since we sat down.

  ‘No. I can’t really remember much of last night. Sorry.’

  ‘He’s a nice man. He was always good to me. His name’s Billy Wallis. They used to call him Billy The Bomb Wallis.’

  There’s a flicker of memory as I poke some bacon into my mouth. I see the huge old man standing next to his Jaguar motorcar. Now it all makes sense.

  Maggie sighs. ‘He killed the director for me. I was nineteen and I think Billy was in love with me a little. They never found the body. I always nearly ask him what he did with him, but I never do. Isn’t that strange?’

  I nod and put down my cutlery.

  You should feel special to sleep with someone that someone else is obsessed with. You should feel privileged to eat a juicy burger, while millions starve across the globe. Halfway through, when you’re full, you still throw it in the bin.

  There must have been millions of young men fantasising about sleeping with Margaret Parks back then. I look at her and see the stringy skin hanging underneath her chin. I see the ridges of worn skin round her mouth caused by smoking.

  Close my eyes. Imagine her in a 60’s short skirt and those kinky boots. I open my eyes and see a faded movie poster more than I do a woman.

  This is always the difficult part. When is it polite to leave? You’re out of bed now, the intimate part is over and now you’re having breakfast.

  Maggie looks at me. I’m sitting in my boxer shorts and the cold wind is making my nipples hard. She looks me over. ‘I want you to come to all my parties,’ she says.

  ‘Well,’ I say, ‘I don’t think…’

  ‘I insist. You don’t want to upset a film star do you? Especially one with connections in the underworld.’ She tilts her head back and laughs, bursts of smoke escaping her mouth.

  I look down at the rocks and they seem so inviting.

  Margaret Parks tells me how she likes to give parties for her celebrity friends. She gets so lonely on her own, so she invites them to stay for a few nights. She’s known for her parties, she says proudly and lights another cigarette with the remainder of her last one.

  I look at her chest showing through her silk robe. Her wrinkled, tobacco stained skin seems to be collecting between her breasts, trying to hide away from the limelight.

  Her skin is thick and yellowed b
y tobacco.

  Maggie takes me back through the house after seeing my goose bumps, and makes me put on a large blue bathrobe. With her arm round my waste, she takes me into the enormous plush kitchen.

  ‘This kitchen cost me twenty thousand pounds.’ Maggie nods and leant back on the work surface.

  On the kitchen table I notice several opened bills. All of them are final demands.

  Maggie begins to tell me how we met. She says she sent someone to collect more guests for her party. She had grown bored with her usual crowd of TV stars and sent out for some different friends.

  It seemed Maggie had been collecting friends for a long time.

  I was drunk and found collapsed on a bed at another party, while a tearful girl was tugging at my trousers. Billy Wallis scooped me up, carried me back to his Jaguar and put me along side a bunch of pretty students who thought they were in a taxi.

  You could be in any bed in the world. The power of alcohol has always been its ability to get you home to your bed from where ever you had ended up. Now alcohol had turned traitor to me.

  Maggie found me in her bedroom and sat next to me, her hand on my leg. ‘You’re a handsome man.’

  She gave me something to drink, she says. Something to help my hangover.

  I told her, apparently, that I thought she was beautiful.

  Janet makes sticks of rock with messages running through the middle. She has one that reads: you raped me, you fucking bitch.

  At school, once a year, they would make us go to the residential care homes with baskets of food and give them to the old people. We would sit and listen to them and try not to yawn. Never ever did we have to touch them.

  ‘It was such a wonderful party,’ Maggie exclaims suddenly, clapping her hands together. ‘It reminded me of the sixties. Not that I remember anything.’