by Joe Stretch
To be a shagger of others, particularly a shagger of girls like Carly, demands sacrifice. So it is that Steve smiles carefully when she returns from town with numerous shopping bags, or when she points her finger at certain garments in various catalogues. He doesn’t complain. Carly is a choice: the glorious twenty-first-century choice between fantasy and mind. Carly makes Steve feel exactly like a man. Extremely like a man. A cock god, a swordsman, a sexpert, etc.
‘How many times was it last night, Stevie?’
Steve listens as the condoms titter below. ‘Twice,’ he says, turning away from Carly’s smoke and shutting his eyes tight.
‘I could go all night. Really. I could fuck all day,’ says Carly, stubbing out her fag and reaching round Steve’s arse cheeks to where his cock and balls discuss the meaning of life. She gently jigs his webbed testicles, taps at his cock until it moves like a flag flown in mourning, to half-mast.
‘I’m not going on top.’
‘I’m too fucked.’
‘Just wank me off.’
This is life. This is glorious life. There is a burst of activity as Carly drags Steve on to his back and makes for his middle. She gets herself into a comfortable position and, with a soft grip, begins to wank him off, as agreed. One thing has been proved: boys love friction, and being wanked off by a girl is the easiest source of it. It’s stress free, guilt free, and needn’t be repaid. Unlike a blow job, which is worldsplittingly political and requires a measured, softly spoken diplomacy. Carly’s strokes begin to get more vigorous and Steve feels he owes her nothing.
An area of the blue duvet is going up and down like a fast heart beating under thin skin. Steve’s eyes shut, capturing situations of sex inside his head. A mixture of fantasy and icicled reality: the begging eyes of a conquered female, the round African American arses he clocked on the web, the merits of globalisation, a pop star round his cock, a film star at his balls.
It’s as if all Steve has are his looks, which are so good they virtually guarantee him intercourse with any girl in the Western world. Lots and lots of lifting weights occupy a great deal of Steve’s time on earth. Up and down, making his body bigger and bigger. He’s changing and, deep down, he blames Carly, he reckons she makes him less refined. Carly doesn’t give a shit.
She thinks of products as her wrist moves up and down. She pictures clothes. She sees lifestyle in her hand: ripped jeans, stiletto heels, her tortilla palm wrapped round alert cock.
There is a desperate silence in this room, broken only by Steve’s silly groans. He knows it. She knows it. The condoms beside the bed know it. The sewers are rising.
3
Only Joking
SOUTH FROM CENTRAL Manchester down Oxford Road gets you to Fallowfield. Two gloriously young students, Johnny and Rebecca, enter Platt Fields Park with their arms loosely linked. They’re not lovers. Linking arms is very popular in the early twenty-first century, even amongst friends. Today the sun is scarlet and the sky seems almost green. A young man glides by on rollerblades, headphones in his ears, swaying from side to side. Rollerblading is getting less popular these days. Never trust a rollerblader. They’re a bunch of fucking nihilists. They don’t believe in anything.
Johnny and Rebecca are wearing shoes. Rebecca watches their pacing feet through aviator shades, the ice-cold sweat from Johnny’s T-shirt is troubling her naked arm. ‘The lads in my flat have stuck porn all over the kitchen wall,’ she says, disentangling her arm from Johnny’s and brushing it gently with her palm.
Johnny is crap at replying. So he doesn’t. He simply allows his awkward, stooping posture to become more extreme. The mere mention of pornography causes the teeth of his brain to chatter. He can’t imagine porn. Has never seen it. Loosely linking arms with Rebecca is as close as Johnny has come to sex. And now our arms are no longer linked, he notices. Because of my sweat, he concludes, she disliked the cold, wet sensation of my sweat.
‘It’s a real montage. Hardcore on almost every wall. It strikes me as rather odd. What were they thinking?’
The path ahead of them ends and opens out into a large expanse of grass. Fellow students roll around with each other, some read in the shade of trees. Boys kick footballs to each other over long distances. Johnny takes his chance and sprints ahead of Rebecca.
‘Where are you going?’
Johnny’s crap at replying so he just runs off. Rebecca watches as he escapes towards a tree. He climbs it quickly and hangs from a branch. Rebecca is Johnny’s only friend. She knows this. That’s why she sets aside time to walk with him or cook him dinner. For Johnny has an ugly little face, friendly, but so unfortunate. His features positioned like darts thrown drunkenly at a board. His eyes like underwater organisms, forced to breathe the air. Hanging from a tree, the large discs of sweat under each of his arms are conspicuous. His frame is long and gangly; he’s what people call a lanky bastard. Certainly, he’s a lanky bastard. Limbs like lengths of inflexible rope.
‘I am the Milky Bar Kid!’ shouts Johnny, swinging in the breeze, his voice retaining its adolescent croak. ‘The Milky Bar Kid is strong and tough. He is a figment of the male imagination!’ Johnny only ever speaks in joke.
Rebecca passes the tree, smiling, embarrassed. She is short in stature, her body contains curves, her haircut is a sedate chestnut bob and her face is a face, a pretty one, soft, as if shielded by a light mist. She watches as Johnny drops from the branch and accidentally crumples into a small heap. He has the knees of a child; muddy and many-sided. He ambles after Rebecca with the unfortunate lurching movements of doomed youth.
Johnny, of course, is in love with Rebecca. On the first day of term he tripped and fell at her feet. Her ankles, Jesus, thighs, the darkness up her skirt, in love, instantly. His little mind is full of her and his little heart is full of arrows. Her cleavage; it reminds him of not breathing. But he’s a lanky bastard. He has unfashionable genes. Fucked about by fate. A colourful acne flows from ear to ear.
‘I don’t understand it. What am I meant to believe is in your mind, Johnny? I mean men, in general?’
Johnny’s mind contains broken swings and a knackered roundabout around which tracksuited villains sip cider, throw stones and make him think and do stupid things. Especially around Rebecca.
‘Men are rank, really, men are really rank,’ says Rebecca, finding a place on the grass and falling backwards into it. She’s thoughtful. Wonderful. A full middle-class figure that speaks of swimming lessons, trips to France, passing your driving test and being rewarded with a car. Beside her, Johnny is attempting to sit down. But he’s not even cool enough to sit, can’t find where to put his legs. He can be quite funny, I suppose, but beyond that his talents are eating, shitting, getting ill and breathing.
One of the things that Johnny loves about Rebecca is her mild political commitment. This consists of her making one or both of the following points on a monthly basis, usually on occasions of personal failure or moderate fatigue.
Point one: ‘How, Johnny, can we inhabit a planet where half the population is starving, and the other half is deliberately starving themselves?’
Point two: ‘[Politician A] is only interested in creating a context in which [multinational corporation X] can successfully and safely establish factories in [poor country Y], the guy doesn’t give a fuck about human rights, just free fucking trade.’
Point one is actually more of a question, albeit rhetorical, so as compensation here’s the usual extension of point two: ‘I’ll tell you something, Johnny, free trade has got nothing to do with freedom.’
This more than constitutes profundity in many of man’s days and ages. Rebecca is to be applauded for her efforts.
Clap. Clap. Clap. Clap.
In Johnny’s eyes Rebecca is the vanguard of the proletariat, with an intimidating set of tits to match. She stretches out in the sun and his eyes roll like marbles down the mysterious contours of her body. He barely knows what a tit is. Can’t really imagine one, its consistency, its texture.
/>
‘When I graduate, I think I’d like to teach in a prison,’ says Rebecca, uprooting clumps of grass and placing them on the inch of flesh that is revealed between her shirt and her skirt. When I graduate I’d like to be that little clump of grass, thinks Johnny, like little green pubes. I’d like to be natural. I’d like to hide where your buttocks meet your thighs and not be found.
‘Definitely,’ continues Rebecca, absently brushing away the grass, ‘I’d really like to work with sex offenders, get inside their heads.’
Just as Johnny’s trying to work out what sexual offence he could commit so as to land Rebecca as his teacher, the sun disappears behind a cloud and a football bounces between the two of them and comes to rest. It becomes noticeably colder. A wind blows. I’m not capable of rape, thinks Johnny. Can you go to prison for simply staring at girls?
Johnny drifts off, wondering whether wolf-whistling is a sex crime. Rebecca looks to where the football came from and watches as a young man begins to jog in their direction. She smiles. It wouldn’t cross Johnny’s mind to kick the ball back. He couldn’t kick air.
The jogging boy wears no top; his pectoral muscles jump fiercely up and down with every foot that hits the ground. Rebecca scans down his body to the neatly tensed six-pack, the seams of his perfectly baggy shorts, sharp shins flanked by calf, trainered feet, dancing laces. Rebecca gets a lurching feeling. A sense of being alive and a sense of being fooled.
‘I feel sick,’ she says suddenly, ‘what’s that smell?’ Rebecca knows. She has smelt the danger, seen it in the lines that define the muscles of young men’s chests.
‘I’ll never be a sex offender,’ says Johnny, noticing the football for the first time and wincing at its muddy, worn leather, at it horrendous kinetic potential. He sees the boy, too, and turns away.
Rebecca doesn’t. Her eyes are on the football. It moved. Slightly. The seams that bind the pentagons of black and white leather begin to prise apart. Rebecca sits up. The football is mouthing something to her, trying to communicate, an expression of terrible fear on its kicked and muddied face. Thudding footsteps get louder. The boy arrives, the skin that binds his skeleton tensing and relaxing with his gasping mouth.
‘Sorry,’ he says, addressing Rebecca. Johnny looks at the young man’s face and instinctively raises a hand to his own, running it across the bloody terrain of his cheeks. He returns his eyes to the ground, which he gouges with a stick.
‘No problem,’ says Rebecca, rolling the ball towards the young man’s feet but not wishing to look at it, in case it starts talking again. She doesn’t wish to be warned or persuaded by a football. It wouldn’t be right. The boy runs the sole of his shoe over the ball and begins dribbling in the direction of his friends, hoofing it towards them after a few metres and running on.
His eyes, thinks Johnny, recalling how the young man had observed Rebecca, did his eyes get erections?
‘You OK, Johnny?’ asks Rebecca, taking a tissue from her bag.
Is this how it has to be, thinks Johnny, sex sewn into my brain, like air inside a ball? It’s Rebecca, he thinks, she’s making my brain go red. Johnny turns to Rebecca with a smile pulled across his face like a zip. Gentle Johnny, a sex offender? No. His brain blushes. He’s only joking: ‘Tonight, Rebecca, I’m going to drill a drizzly minge!’
‘Pardon?’
‘I’m going to hammer away at a twat!’
Rebecca gets up from the grass. She’s offended. A twat? She’s not laughing. She’s frowning, a tissue held against her face. What would Johnny want with a twat? thinks Rebecca. What’s the smell? Is it the stench of young men thinking?
The bullshit is carried on the breeze. Rebecca and Johnny both sense danger. Sense that a previously perfect system of interlocking shapes has somehow fallen out of synch and that this spells trouble. Rebecca brushes grass and dried earth from her long khaki skirt and turns to observe the group of footballing boys. They’re crowding around a hedge, poking at it with long sticks, retreating cautiously after each jab. The football has rolled into a wasps’ nest.
4
Cash and Waste
WE CAN’T STAND still. We don’t wear rollerblades. We have more characters to meet. Last night the air was stuffy, as ever, stuffy with sirens, shouts and short skirts. Rented limousines crawled through the city centre, from Corporation Street, down Cross Street, Deansgate, through Castlefield. Drinks flow in England. Weekends arrive with gifts for the thirsty, leaving behind only trickles of piss.
Boy 1 and Boy 2 meet at ‘The Bar’ for lunch at three o’clock. The Bar, pronounced ‘Thee Bar’, is not quite the bar to frequent, but as franchises go, it’s good. Boy 1 takes a steak sandwich and Boy 2 takes a BLT. The steak sandwich, as it must from 1998 onwards, contains caramelised red onion. Caramelised red onion is seen as really, really delicious. Boy 1 wants to be rich, he wants to be fucking rock and he wants the high life: red onions, houmous, focaccia, fit-as-fuck bird. Food having been consumed, both boys are left feeling powerful. The weekend looms above them dressed in hilarious drag, it offers them its creased and open palm.
At five o’clock the lager living begins. The lager loving begins. Boy 1 goes to the bar, returning with two pints of Stella and a handful of change. At first it’s moderate, the drinking. But subtle sips give way to greedy gulps and their hearts begin to darken. After four pints they begin to piss and a banal chaos starts up; neither can go half a pint without jogging to the bogs and spraying into the urinal, a clenched fist held against the white tiled walls for support. At seven o’clock a fleeting lethargy hits them both and the subject of Colin is raised.
‘We should call him,’ says Boy 2, belatedly tugging up his flies.
‘Should we?’ Boy 1 replies, his eyes fixed on the girls that by now are pouring into The Bar.
‘Yeh, man, we should.’
Colin is heading down Sackville Street when his phone vibrates in his pocket and he comes to a stop. The display glows against the night, the words ‘Boy 2’ flashing across the middle. Answer?
‘You sound fucked,’ says Colin, as the lager-lipped tone of Boy 2’s voice creeps from the earpiece. Colin agrees to join the two boys at The Bar. He does this reluctantly, because he has to. He does this because, nowadays, opting out of social occasions is a form of self-mutilation. The social is everything. Colin suspects that when removed from the glass gazes of others, he is nothing. And it hurts.
Colin ends the call, turns around and starts walking in the direction of The Bar. He temps at the University of Manchester, admin for the English Department. Having worked late, he is still in his work clothes. Don’t worry. Luckily for Colin, the sartorial code at the university is pretty casual. He’s wearing a pair of smart jeans and a well-ironed blue shirt. (Apart from the odd, short-lived experiment with the idea of an intentionally creased shirt, by about 2004, the well-ironed shirt has achieved supremacy.) Colin skips onto Whitworth Street, past the croaking, toad-like building of Oxford Road train station and on towards south Deansgate and The Bar.
He crosses one of the many wooden bridges that lead on to Deansgate Locks. The Bar looms, its cheap sign lit up, its doorway cordoned off with red rope and brass stands. It’s getting busier.
There are plenty of couples. Colin’s head begins to spin. The couple is still going strong. There are long tanned legs, bunches of birds that you could screw up, smash, straightening their limbs with red hot tongs. Spinning fast. Lovely arses for Colin to look at coldly. Couples seem vile to Colin. These men and women are the wettest, most vile, idiotic, sick, compromised cowards he’s ever seen. He looks at beefed-up men like they’re hideous idiots, preoccupied with some misunderstood idea. Cocks. Colin doesn’t want a bird, fit as fuck or not. But he’d burn the clothes of these turd-tanned slappers, burn their push-up bras off their bodies just to show them. Colin’s girlfriend left him a year ago and, at this stage, he isn’t sure whether he’ll ever be able to have sex again. He pays at the door, entering the club that The Bar has become.
/> The majestic boozers of this damp century wade around the dance floor. It’s dark but the room is full of psychedelic drinks: girls and boy sucking on neon liquids, pouring golden fluid, animated by flashing lights and colours, down their throats and into their stomachs.
This is what we people live for, a lot of us think. Great times. Great times. The music is running as fast as it can and the dance floor is heaving with fabrics and different skins. The place is burnt hollow with cleavage, with skirts short enough to reveal the beginnings of hard, curved bums. There are tight T-shirts, see-through tops, muscles, perfectly ironed shirts of white, of red, of blue. Oh, they drink a shitload, they do. These are those who will live and die but this is a generation that mustn’t get old; so great is its responsibility to the nihilism of its youth. Colin waits fifteen minutes for a pint of Stella and joins Boy 1 and Boy 2 at the edge of the dance floor.
‘All right, mate!’
‘Yeh!’
‘How was work?’
‘Fine. You’re fucking wasted!’
‘We’ve been here all day!’
These three are idle young men. This is a room full of idle young men in pursuit of idle young women in pursuit of idle young men. Cyclical and unchanging. Paceless. Anger warms and finally burns. It creeps up on you on the dance floor or outside the club. It ruins your night, then is thrown off and forgotten in the course of some restless, semi-comatose sleep. Sex is some hard-throated bout of power play. Girls and boys passing time. Staring, looking, touching, fucking, leaving, missing, abandoning, living, trying and fucking up and trying again, anal, stopping, taxi-rank fights, bus blow jobs, orgasms, excitement, experimentation, fetish and a frantic smell of spermicide.
Boy 1 and Boy 2 sway on the dance floor, stumbling in the direction of tits, their gelled hair the texture of barbed wire. Colin watches with a choking throat and dried-up eyes as the rest of the club work themselves up into a frenzy, pair off, fight and leave. Colin is a granite statue with flickering marble eyes. He surveys the girls. He weighs them, unwraps them, cuts and prices them. It’s slaughter, quick, it’s slaughter.