Friction

by Joe Stretch

  Steve jumps from his bed and shuts the drawer of his bureau. Carly robs him regularly. She robs him because she loves to shop, because Steve is her fit, rich boyfriend and can afford to be robbed. Steve, mostly, allows the robberies to go unnoticed. For Carly is his fit-as-fuck girlfriend and therefore must, he supposes, be granted certain privileges. Normally, after such occasions of theft, Steve will produce his cock at the breakfast bar or in the lounge and suggest, quite forcefully, that Carly suck it. Which she does, has to, really, because she robbed him.

  This transaction lies at the heart of Carly and Steve’s relationship and they both treat it with respect. Under normal circumstances, of course, a penis unleashed at a breakfast bar would possess only a slim chance of getting sucked. It would stride purposefully from its fly like a monarch on to a balcony, only to find that no subjects have turned up to applaud its arrival. After theft though, it’s quite different. Carly knows this as much as Steve. People cheer and wave flags. Carly reverentially drops to her knees.

  In the shower, Steve lets the water run over him. His hands follow the trendy contours of his body. His six-pack scrums with itself, his abdomen drops triangularly to what he feels must certainly be his deadly dick. But the breakfast bar, must justice really be found at the breakfast bar? A brightly lit blow job? Appliances humming gently in the background? What a well-lit and lonely fate. Steve shuts his eyes from the soap and sees the cardiganed girls of his university past. Yes, his colleagues on his economics BA, the ponytailed frigids that had marvelled at his beauty and at the confident strides with which he entered the lecture theatre. Perhaps, thinks Steve, drying himself, I should have married one of them, seduced a little Mary or a little Jane, bought her fancy lingerie and had kids and discussed the misery and injustices of the open market, the merits of globalisation.

  ‘No,’ he says to himself, rising like a dancer to meet his gaze in the mirror, the red towel falling off his blond hair.

  ‘No way,’ he says again, shocked anew by the symmetry of his features. His haircut perched on his scalp like an endangered bird. No way, indeed. Because you die, he thinks, yeah, because you die and should never miss the chance to feel some real beauty. He leaves the bathroom and returns to the bedroom, picks up the condoms and flings them towards the bin. They go straight in. Good. Because you die.

  An hour later, as Steve pulls his Audi TT out of the underground car park of his apartment block, the decision has been made. No more bullshit blow jobs at the breakfast bar. Anal, that’s the ticket. All the rucksacked girls of his middle youth are gone, only Carly remains. Carly, whose knickers match her brain and whose bra matches her heart. Carly, it’s impossible to imagine her heart as anything but tailored, designed with tomorrow’s sex in mind. She has thighs that remind the normal boys of absolute joy. Perfectly curved. But anal, thinks Steve, rejecting distraction, anal’s the ticket.

  Steve pulls the car on to Upper Brook Street, heading south, past the instantly outdated flats built around the turn of the twentieth century. He feels perfectly entitled to play the economy of sex. Sex is his way of solving things. Before now he might have spoken, turned a phrase or placed a kiss. But few turn phrases nowadays. Most bang away at another, eyes shut, just breathy hissing coming from their tightened lips. Carly robbed me, he thinks, anal will make me a man once more. Traffic lights go red, he checks his phone: no word from Carly. The lights go green.

  He turns right off Upper Brook Street, down Moseley Road, through Fallowfield, then Withington, past the cancer hospital and its air of glassy, transparent dread, then further south to Didsbury. There is sunlight and the streets have been cleaned. Didsbury ‘Village’, as it’s curiously known, is dominated by franchise restaurants. Steve parks up then buys a copy of the Financial Times in a newsagent’s. He exits the shop, the pink paper folded under his arm. A man walks by with cardboard coffee cups for hands. No, not that. Normality. A brunette jogs past in tight shorts and sports bra, her tongue visible like the tip of a violet lipstick. No, no, normality. Steve crosses the road.

  He has travelled to Didsbury to meet Frank. Frank is a fat twat. He’s sitting sipping a latte on the terrace of a franchise Italian. He has a papier-mâche head and a gut like an incoming tide. Frank is Steve’s guru, an expert in investment and risk, the reason for Steve’s burgeoning wealth. Frank spends his days relocating his money and watching his bank account swell. His nights are spent bantering with the prostitutes of Cheshire. Invariably, as the sun rises, Frank finds himself drunk, protruding like a human-shaped tumour out of the back of some high-quality call girl.

  ‘I’ve done it again, my boy,’ says Frank, through a terribly deep, Adam’s-appley laugh. ‘I’ve done it again. Waiter. Another latte!’

  Steve takes a seat opposite Frank, the glass table a circle of bright reflection, as if a miniature sun shines between them, supporting drinks. He waits for the guttural reverb of Frank’s laugh to fade, then watches as the rough, fatty tides of Frank’s cheeks turn to a ripple and then settle around his wet, maroon mouth.

  ‘Have you told Carly?’

  ‘No, I don’t think I will. How much do we stand to make, exactly?’

  ‘Frankly, my boy, millions. All Autopen stock has risen six hundred per cent.’

  Steve’s lips sprawl awkwardly into a half-smile, all uneven, unsure whether happiness is quite the right feeling. But it is. Yes, it is, so he lets out a cautious chuckle. Frank and Steve invested heavily in the Autopen Corporation. Frank got the tip, the Relentless Bliss is going to go huge.

  The waiter returns with the coffees. There is tense silence as they’re placed down, then the two men lean forward and sip at the light brown lattes, their eyes meet, shining like silver coins in the sun.

  ‘We’re rich, my boy,’ says Frank. ‘It seems as though girls are extremely keen on machines.’

  Steve sighs, a hand in his hair, his fingers tensed and spread equally like the bristles of a brush. He’d been reluctant to invest in the Autopen sex machines, had to be persuaded by Frank. Don’t you understand, boy, Frank had blared, Autopen is the future. All of us men, we will be replaced. Sexually, we are absolutely replaceable. This wasn’t an idea Steve was keen to agree with. The beauty of man, believes Steve, the beauty of himself, is the future. His hair of various shades of blond and its original black, his wonderful clothes, clean and distressed, his ringed toe, brass bracelets, necklaces, moisturiser, tattoos, perfume, gel. Beautiful man is the future. Beautiful me.

  ‘I don’t buy it,’ says Steve. ‘It’s a fad. I say we sell soon.’

  ‘You don’t think, Steve, that your darling, fuck-puppet, Carly, could be pleasured by a machine? Can you not conceive of that?’

  ‘No,’ Steve replies, the tone of his ‘no’ failing slightly and becoming more of a ‘nahh’. He reaches for his coffee, gazing uncertainly beyond Frank’s huge left shoulder, which curves like the gradual, endless throat of a docile whale. It’s possible, I think, that on some level we humans know everything. That we choose simply to ignore the knowledge brought to us by the more cosmic, bowel-based, mystical senses. So it is that Steve shifts in his seat at the suggestion that his own lover could defect to the machines. Deep down, whatever that means, he knows she could. On some level, he’s suppressing the clouded, only vague image of Carly, spreadeagled in the cubicle of Versus, the machine moving in and out, vibrating fiercely and perfectly.

  ‘No, Carly won’t go for machines,’ he says eventually. ‘I fuck like one.’

  ‘I see.’ Frank leans back on to the layers of fat that congregate above his belt. ‘We will sell,’ he says, suppressing a burp. ‘In many ways, you’re right. Autopen is a fad. The Americans are far too keen on the idea of replicating penetration. It’s nonsense.’

  ‘Nonsense?’

  ‘Of course. Penetration is a trap we keep falling into, a needless homage to a Stone Age ritual. The future lies on the outside, in the superficial stimulation of the exterior, with electricity.’

  Steve bows his
head, placing both his hands on the table. He looks at his diamond-encrusted watch. What is time doing? If I am anything, thinks Steve, I am a penetrator. Markets, fashions, cunts, arseholes, elites, parties, mouths. I’m a penetrator. Running out of time.

  ‘I’m going to take a trip,’ continues Frank, his fingers fiddling with each other like lovers at an orgy for the fat. ‘I’m going to go to Japan, find the company with the best sex machine. Then we’ll invest. The electronic orgasm, that’s where we’re headed. Don’t look so glum, my boy.’

  ‘I’m not glum, Frank.’

  ‘Has Carly been robbing you again?’

  Steve moves his empty glass to one side. Milk dried like crystals to the rim. His watch. Diamonds. What is time doing?

  ‘Carly’s fine,’ says Steve. ‘I’m fine. Look at me.’

  ‘You’re a beautiful young man, Steve, a beautiful young man.’

  ‘I know I am.’

  ‘Of course you do. Of course you do.’

  Frank begins to bang on about something, prostitutes, perhaps, they’re constantly frustrating him, but Steve decides to not listen. His relationship with Frank is far from comfortable. Where are the tweeded economists of my youth? he thinks. Where is my respected brain? The lever-arch files, tutorials, ambition, the cups of tea and talk of Keynes. Steve feels his mobile phone vibrate in his jacket pocket, buzzing next to his heart. A text. It’s Carly, no doubt, but he doesn’t look. He feigns interest as Frank talks him through the economic future of mechanical sex. He is, he realises, surrounded by choice. Coated in the stuff, his palms sticky with it. Choice. The fat twat Frank who cares for cash and painfully thin prostitutes with siliconed tits like overkicked footballs. The fit-as-fuck Carly who cares for cash, boob tubes, alcohol, whatever. So much choice. It’s hilarious. Is it possible I’ve made so many choices?

  After declining Frank’s invitation to go to one of Didsbury’s five-star massage parlours, Steve returns to his car and checks his phone.

  Sorry babe. should

  have asked. soz, really soz.

  in town with Girl 1 x x

  Anal then, logically. Because I am still a penetrator, thinks Steve, twisting the key in the ignition. And because you die. Because I’m beautiful and I’m young.

  11

  The Satsuma

  AFTER ABANDONING JOHNNY in the park and talking Dostoevsky at the university, Rebecca is late for work. The sun has dropped below the Town Hall, casting a shadow on to Deansgate. The last of the shoppers beat hasty retreats. They make for car parks, dragging bags and children, aware that night is falling and that they risk being out when the party starts. They feel the beat of the boozers drumming beneath their feet. And they run.

  But, yes, Rebecca. She works in a strip club on Deansgate. She’s an unlikely stripper, really, what with her occasional moral outbursts. But on arriving in Manchester she was keen to become one. Because as much as she resents the cobwebbed corners of the male mind, she cannot help but investigate them. Tonight she’s late for her shift. It’s almost seven by the time she passes through the scarlet curtains and walks down the steps into the Nude Factory.

  In truth, Rebecca had been lucky to get a job as a stripper. Her breasts don’t droop, but nor could they have your eye out. When she came for the interview she knew she was borderline. She had shivered topless in the centre of a back room as men tapped their lower lips, sending clouds of grey smoke towards her. ‘She’s girl next door,’ the manager, Marcus, had said at last. ‘And we need a real pair.’ She got the job. She had smiled and got dressed. As she left the interview she heard a bouncer whispering to himself. ‘Wicked nipples,’ he had said.

  In the Nude Factory the light is purple and cheap. The air is smoky and greased. Rebecca smiles at the manager, at Marcus, the fat black man who sits at the bar in a cloud of smoke, bomber jackets and men. Marcus is medically incapable of smiling.

  ‘You’re late,’ he shouts, his voice like a desperate engine.

  ‘I know,’ she calls, ‘traffic was a nightmare.’

  Rebecca makes straight for the changing room. She enjoys being the girl next door. She enjoys the job in general. The money is amazing and the other girls are good company. Invariably, she arrives to find a streaked-orange stripper hunched tearfully over her huge tits, weeping about a man whose name sounds like it ought to belong to a pair of trainers. Yes, she enjoys them, the other girls. Those that aren’t students are simply fascinating tragedies, their lives grated to shreds by drugs, men and age.

  Rebecca removes the green khaki skirt which has made her legs invisible all day. Her midriff, she knows, contains just enough definition. She is the girl next door. She is changing into matching underwear, a black contraption. She removes her faded day bra. It’s like the unblindfolding of a particularly sexy terrorist. Her breasts look like halogen lights under water.

  Rebecca runs a comb through her neat brown bob, thickens her eyelashes with mascara and steps into a pair of stilettos she purchased specifically for work. As she clops into the bar, the music razors her ears. She thinks it’s fucking shit; so do I, so would you. Crap chart dance with thick beats and inane lyrics sung with ridiculous conviction, usually by a black woman. She makes for the bar where she’s handed a gin and tonic. Inebriation is the stripper’s secret; they are all getting completely fucked. Pills are forbidden, because it makes them dance badly. They lose eroticism and then money. Some do them anyway. There’s coke in the back room if you can stomach the attention of the resident dealer. Most can, it’s the only way to endure the boredom and the incessant nudity.

  ‘If you’re late again, you’re fired.’ Marcus takes the gin and tonic from Rebecca’s hand and places it on the bar. ‘And you’re dancing for Pete.’

  ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ says Rebecca, because Pete is a regular and a nutter, a lonely idiot, and now she has to go and show him her breasts – bring them up close to his misty eyes and his chapped lips. This is punishment. She was late and now she must dance for the dirty nutter. Fine. She swigs from her drink and sets off in Pete’s direction. The bar is half full. Shockingly shite and nicotine-yellow chandeliers hang like meat from the low, red ceiling. Disgusting curdling laughs rise above the music as men buy dances for one another. The Nude Factory caters for the old-fashioned wanker, little business is done here, customers count coppers for one final dance. Rebecca exchanges smiles with some of the other girls as she takes a seat next to Pete on a poorly upholstered banquette.

  ‘Pete.’

  ‘Oh hello, girly, thank you, I should say, thank you. Been slow for me, so slow so thank you.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘No no, it’s OK, girly. Drinky? Can I buy you a drinky?’

  He isn’t mad, Pete, just a bit lost. Another corduroyed, disorientated anybody that the city seems to secrete. On his cheeks, dirt and wiry grey hair gather around healed white scars. A look in his eye suggests abuse. Many forms of abuse.

  Marcus’s eyes are fixed on Rebecca; there’s no way of getting out of this. Marcus is a sack-happy twat. Never thinks twice. Resents the fact he’s forced to employ students. Feels they fail to maintain ideas of glamour and celebrity that ought to characterise a decent strip club. Rebecca removes the ‘Nude Token’ from Pete’s hand, places his arms down by his sides and pushes his back straight against the back of the seat.

  ‘Oh, yes, Rebecca. Becky lovely jugs,’ mumbles Pete, a yellow cheese-like substance thickly coating his front teeth.

  Rebecca opens her ears briefly to register the tempo and tone of the song she must dance to. Having done so, she returns to the concentrated silence she’s perfected in the six months she’s worked here. She begins to sway and gyrate gently in front of the regular, the nutter, the lonely idiot. After exactly thirty seconds of moderate thrusting, swaying and stroking, she bends down and brings her face up close to his. This is misdirection. While Pete attempts to cope with the proximity of a youthful, seemingly aroused face, her hands are undoing her bra. Imagine his surprise as she r
ises to reveal breasts. Her breasts will be enjoyed by Pete for exactly a minute. She will support them, squeeze them, tease them and tweak them in precisely that order. Of course, he is forbidden to touch.

  ‘Your hooters, Becky. Honk honking hooters!’

  Rebecca runs the index finger of her left hand down Pete’s scrambled egg face. He looks up at her through Perspex eyes. The club sounds like shouting underwater. It’s time to take a shit.

  ‘Taking a shit’ is how the girls refer to the task of lap dancing for particularly grotesque men. It was coined by Rebecca’s good friend Sidney. ‘Right, I’m just gonna go and wipe my arse, back in a sec,’ Sidney would say, after grinding on the crotch of some cheese-dicked punter. The kind of guy whose crotch feels like a countryside footpath, eroded by rain. Before the invasion of American clubs, such men wouldn’t have even been let in. The Nude Factory survived easily without recourse to the flimsy capital of the underclass. Nowadays, virtually everyone is welcome. Marcus can’t afford a dress code or strict behavioural guidelines, and he hates to see nudity go to waste. It must be watched and paid for.

  Rebecca turns her back on Pete and stands with her feet one pace apart. She slowly bends over so her hair falls down over her head and her face is only inches from the ground. Blood runs to her eyeballs. If you were Pete, you’d see the skin on Rebecca’s legs pulled tight enough to reveal the muscles and bones of her thighs and her arse. You’d see the strain on her reddening face and the fingers of her right hand half-heartedly simulating masturbation.