Friction

by Joe Stretch

  ‘Girly, girly, beautiful.’

  Then down in one firm movement on to his crotch, the feeling of muddy corduroy all over her clean bottom. This is the worst part, actually metaphorically taking the shit. It’s impossible to remain distant during this phase of the dance, for fear the erection you inevitably find yourself sitting on takes you by surprise. In Pete’s case, Rebecca is aware of something hard in his pants, but feels it can’t possibly be considered cylindrical. It feels like a satsuma. Rebecca hopes the physicality of dirty, elderly penises will remain a mystery to her always. Nevertheless, she endures a minute of squirming about on Pete’s crotch and she performs her customary lean-back manoeuvre. This involves throwing her head back over the customer’s right shoulder then lifting and toying with her tits. This provides a great view for the customer, a sexy view, she supposes. This moment is the secret to her good tips. As she tweaks each of her nipples, the satsuma in Pete’s trousers begins to pulsate violently. Time to stop. Sick bastard. Old shit. What an incredible lap dancer I am.

  ‘OK?’ she says to Marcus as she returns to the bar clutching the crumpled tenner given to her by Pete. Now, Pete is trying to camouflage his hard satsuma as he sidesteps across the bar en route to the toilet to piss and wank, or rather, wank then piss. Rebecca takes her drink from the bar and goes to greet Sidney, her friend, who leans, smoking, against the back wall.

  ‘What time do you call this?’ says Sidney, a fellow English student with a self-financed boob job and hair the colour of soft sand.

  ‘I know, but the Dostoevsky module’s full, I had to go in and beg.’

  Sidney holds her cigarette to Rebecca’s lips. She inhales deeply.

  ‘I was out with Johnny, too, until he started going on about twats and minges.’

  ‘I see. Have your flatmates taken the porn down yet?’

  ‘No, they’ve coated my cupboard in cum-shots.’

  ‘Ha.’

  Sidney laughs and Rebecca almost stumbles amid an-all-too brief rush of nicotine.

  Rebecca finds it difficult to reconcile the male as sexual agent with the male as intellectual agent in her overall view of men. Dostoevsky is a case in point. The question is, how did Dostoevsky feel about women? Did he do a bit of writing, then go to a club and stare at girls? Stiffen his satsuma over vodka? How famous was Dostoevsky when he was alive? She isn’t sure but she needs to know. She knows that Baudelaire visited prostitutes; was this a clue? Perhaps. Do all men harbour pulsating satsumas and thoughts and instincts darker than the human eye can see?

  ‘I’m fucking tired of men,’ Rebecca says to Sidney.

  ‘I know. It’s weird how they’re all wankers.’

  What, wonders Rebecca, did Dostoevsky wank about? Something cool, perhaps. Like hairy armpits. But no, she thinks, tits. Certainly tits.

  Rebecca’s sexual history is limited to exactly three relationships, all carried out between the ages of sixteen and eighteen while she was growing up in the Lake District. All three of these relationships were with boys of around twenty-four; farm hands, small-time rural drug dealers. These relationships were founded less on love and more on the allure of the motor car, cigarettes and the novelty of cock. She has never really been able to understand men since she became older and the attraction of cider and sex in barns waned. Rebecca firmly believes that boys are comprised of two entirely separate halves that simply betray, battle and deny each other. Perhaps Johnny is one half sensitive, funny man, and one half sex-starved goblin. Maybe this is why he tries telling jokes about twats and minges. Because his mind is being driven to overdrive by a thinly veiled desire for heavy metal sex.

  Rebecca turns to Sidney to find that she has disappeared. She scans down to one side and locates her, she’s taking a shit on a skinny businessman with a floral tie.

  ‘Sidney,’ asks Rebecca, ‘how do you feel about sex?’ Sidney pauses mid-gyration and thinks; the businessman grimaces.

  ‘Well, I think it’s meant to be good fun,’ replies Sidney. ‘But weirdly, it rarely is.’ The face of the businessman dissolves into peach mush. He appears to die beneath Sidney’s near perfect buttocks.

  No use. Rebecca can’t work this out alone; she needs to speak to Dostoevsky. I need to date Dostoevsky, she thinks. I think. He faced a firing squad in Moscow at a very young age. They didn’t fire but he stood there for a while, blindfolded, shitting it presumably, waiting for the roar of the guns. After surviving that, everything must be valued and pretty euphoric. Sex must be kind of evangelical. Happy, clappy, thankful and kind, eyes open, drinking in the occasion. What a guy.

  ‘If you want to talk about sex,’ says Sidney, rising to reveal an elevated area of pulsating pinstripe around the businessman’s fly, then turning to take a tenner from his weak grip, ‘then you should go and talk to that guy over there.’

  Rebecca follows Sidney’s finger to where a young man is making notes on various scraps of paper, sipping regularly from a cocktail.

  ‘Take him a White Russian. He’s been downing them since he got here. It’s good money, too. Funny fucking weirdo.’

  The young man has a shaved head and wet eyes, pale blue with defined eyebrows. He looks like a rather primitive line drawing, but handsome, definitely handsome. Rebecca turns and heads towards the bar.

  Of course, the young man is Justin. This should have become clear when you learned about his chosen drink – yet another reference to the White Russian. It wasn’t just a coincidence or a comment on twenty-first-century cocktail consumption, as you might have thought. I guess what happened was that he left the pub on Cross Street, retraced his steps back through St Ann’s Square, on to Deansgate and down into the Nude Factory. His being here makes sense. Think about it. Beyond buying a porn mag, a visit to the Nude Factory is the first logical step on his journey to happy sex and steady living.

  Justin looks up from his notes to see a stripper’s finger pointed directly at him. Sidney? Was that her name? She’d gyrated on his lap an hour or so ago. He hadn’t enjoyed it. Her purplish pimply nipples had seemed absurd, perched, as they were, on top of her somehow translucent skin. He could almost see the silicone beneath. He watches as another stripper visits the bar, returning moments later to his table, placing a White Russian directly in front of him.

  Having placed the drink down, Rebecca takes a seat opposite Justin. She’s intrigued. She stares at him, sending ice cubes clinking around her gin and tonic with a straw. They sit in warm darkness. Unknown to one another. The music blares and naked girls dance. The two of them exchange a look. Thank God they met. And yes, of course, thank fuck. They begin to blabber through the near darkness of the club.

  ‘Hello,’ says Justin.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘I’ve had this idea, quite a big idea.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Shall I pay you now?’

  ‘Yes, do you want a dance?’

  ‘No, thank you.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘I’ve had six already.’

  Rebecca removes two twenty-pound notes from Justin’s hand and screws them up tight in her fist. Justin is clearly drunk, overly so. He’s had a skinful, if you think back to the pub and the restaurant and to his mother. Justin sips from his drink and tweaks his nose lightly. Rebecca wonders whether Justin could survive a firing squad. It’s unlikely, he could barely stand.

  ‘I’m a man,’ Justin begins. ‘And you, well, you’re . . .’

  ‘I’m a woman,’ Rebecca intervenes.

  ‘Of course you are, and I, well, I’ve had this great idea.’

  Rebecca looks down beneath the table to where her legs are tightly crossed around the thin fabric of her underwear. It’s a silly business, life, she thinks, full of fine lines. She wishes to know what men are, or, more precisely, where sexuality and personality meet in them. Justin burps, bringing his hand to his mouth in an attempt to pass it off as a cough. Never. His jaw drops. Words, more words.

  ‘The narrative of love has been written, it is compl
eted. It has been read and understood, now the manuscript must be burned and . . .’

  Justin fumbles over the first line of his oration. With Sidney he’d been more on the ball, more lucid, less hammered. Now the booze is making his head ache and Rebecca is causing his mind to trip. Is she the girl next door? And doesn’t Rebecca have fucking amazing tits? His eyes buzz.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Rebecca, what’s yours?’

  ‘Justin.’

  Technically, Rebecca should have told him her name is Claudette. Every girl in the bar has a stripper name, Claudette is her ‘nom de nudité’, as she calls it. Around them, the Nude Factory is getting busy. The entrance chokes on male, tracksuited youngsters, their yellow eyes magnified by desire. The music ploughs on, soul-shaftingly bad. Rebecca looks at Justin, imploring genius and the ability to survive a firing squad. Bang! No, no, he’s dead, he’s dead. Justin feels a squelch in his brain, as it momentarily loses interest in working.

  ‘Please take your bra off, Rebecca,’ he says, his words fart-like and odorous.

  ‘Would you like a dance, Justin?’

  ‘No, no, I just need a moment. I think I might be hammered.’

  Thirty seconds pass. A segment of Justin’s brain topples out of his left ear and into his drink.

  ‘Take off your bra, Rebecca. I gave you forty quid.’

  Rebecca sighs. Bang! He’s dead. He didn’t survive. For the third time this evening Rebecca reaches her hands round her back and removes her bra.

  ‘How touching, you wish to see my tits,’ she says, arching her spine and leaning back. Justin swills his drink, the segment of brain bobs in the milk. This seems natural. His drunk eyes stare across the table at Rebecca; they seem to smoke a thin green gas. He burps again. Speaks: ‘Really, Rebecca, you really are as fit as fuck.’

  ‘No, Justin, try not to be so predictable. Try to sober up instead,’ she replies.

  Justin seems to be drifting in and out of consciousness. Is he drunk or just deep in thought? Rebecca wonders. He sits, slumped and comatose, watching her tits like he’s watching television. Her nipples hypnotise like late-night static. She knows that she isn’t as fit as fuck. She knows that the alcohol is allowing him to gloss over her lack of height and certain imperfections in her face; imperfections of structure and symmetry.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ says Justin, through a gurgle.

  It’s going wrong for him, too. His drinking has fucked up the plan, wronged the experiment. Oh God, he thinks, I was meant to save us all. Think of all the millions of people across the world, all being denied a happy life of firm sex and expressive, truthful personalities, just because I got too drunk and cocked the experiment up. I should be put in prison.

  ‘OK, listen, Rebecca, put your bra back on.’

  ‘You dickhead.’

  ‘It’s fine, I’m sorry.’

  Bang! He survived. The squad missed. He survived. I called him a dickhead, thinks Rebecca. I’m fine, thinks Justin. Think of humanity and think of the world. Society. All those sex deaths that should be sex lives. As Rebecca reconstructs her bra, Justin pushes his drink to one side and leans towards her with both his elbows on the table.

  ‘So what’s the big idea, Justin?’ asks Rebecca, reassembled once more. Justin smiles a wobbly smile, like a piece of string draped across his face at random. He’s speaking.

  ‘One month ago my father died. A week from now I will receive sixty thousand pounds. This, in light of the fact I feel my life will never serve a purpose or last a long time, is a great deal of money. Rebecca, I have lived my life at the sharp end of capitalism. I’m useless. I will serve, and am happy to serve, no purpose.’

  Rebecca yawns enormously, like a lioness.

  ‘At the age of fourteen I fucked a farm hand,’ she says, ‘blah blah blah. Did you know that Dostoevsky survived a firing squad?’ she adds, impressed. He’s bright, quite funny, too, in a way. Was Dostoevsky funny? Did he crack jokes? What about?

  ‘A farm hand? What do you mean?’

  ‘Nothing, go on.’

  ‘Where was I?’

  ‘Your dad is dead. You are inheriting money and being blunted by capitalism.’

  Justin nods, gulps from his drink. The segment of brain seems soured by the milk. Ever so slightly green. No matter. So drunk. No matter.

  ‘I have money and I’m loveless, devoid of affection. Romantically disabled. But the money, that’s crucial. I have money. I feel so terrible and powerful, Rebecca. I’ve never had a proper job, never went to university. I was brought up, schooled and abandoned to all this. And now all I wish is to go down in flames.’

  ‘Perhaps you should try and sleep off the bravery, you look a little pale.’

  ‘Listen to me. I gonna buy sexual satisfaction. I’m gonna cut through all the society and the shit and achieve happiness and sexual joy through pure buying power.’

  ‘So you came to the Nude Factory?’

  ‘Well, this is just the beginning. I only had the idea a few hours ago.’

  ‘And a lap dance didn’t make you happy?’

  Justin seems to visibly rise in his seat, his back straightens and he places both his hands flat on the table, fingers stretched apart. He stares at them for a moment, then says, ‘Don’t you see how much society could benefit from my experiment?’

  This causes Rebecca to start pissing herself. ‘Not at all, mate, not at all. I really don’t see how we stand to benefit from you fucking a prostitute or two.’

  Justin leans closer, his eyes visibly widening and turning battleship grey. Rebecca leans back in response, her cheeks turning red with amusement. Justin continues to speak with what he believes to be world-changing authority.

  ‘I will buy my way through all the mystery and the tricks. I will plough money into sex until all that’s left is me: happy or dead, humiliated maybe. But me, an honest representation of my needs and my desires. I will be naked and overjoyed, a beacon, a way forward for everyone else who—’

  ‘I’ve got an idea too,’ interrupts Rebecca. ‘It’s that men are all subtly fucked up, sexually and socially challenged. I think you might be doomed.’

  ‘No, not doomed, that’s just it. I’ll save us from the slavery, from damnation. I’ve got this plan, like a scale, each step of my journey. First here and then to a brothel, a good one, the best. Then fetish. I want to cover a great deal of them. Not the comedy ones, but the ones that have a decent amount of industry behind them. Domination or whatever. And then it gets interesting. Orgies maybe. I’m trying to think of ways in which I could shag a celebrity. Do you see what I mean? I’m gonna buy my way through the myths to see what, if anything, lies behind them.’

  ‘Why?’ says Rebecca, more so he’ll keep talking and give her time to think. She’s scrambling through her silent memories of the compulsory economics course she took last semester. She’s wondering whether it’s worth her saying her line about how free trade has got fuck all to do with freedom. But instead, she listens, as Justin slams his hands hard down on to the table with a loud smack: ‘Because I’m bored and I’m useless and I want to be overjoyed by things.’

  Oh, this is the young survivor, thinks Rebecca, as she watches the colour fade from Justin’s cheeks. This may indeed be my young survivor. She looks around the club. It’s full now, naked girls twisting like pale ribbons above starving men. She takes Justin’s drink and takes a large gulp. Is that brain? No, no it can’t be.

  ‘You want to understand yourself, understand your mind and your sex?’ she asks, wiping a thin line of milk from her top lip. Justin nods, not sure entirely what she means and wrestling with a sudden and overwhelming desire to piss.

  ‘Justin,’ Rebecca continues, ‘I want to understand your sexual desire.’ Registering the lack of reaction on Justin’s face, Rebecca leans forward and slaps him lightly across each cheek, whispering, ‘I want to know what you think about my tits.’

  Rebecca spots her own project at work within Justin’s idea. Sexuali
ty, and how the fuck it can be figured out. Is Justin trying to understand how the sexual instinct slots into personality? Is he trying to work out how sex glides into our civilised, considered existence? Perhaps, but he’s also jiggling his leg frantically under the table. At length, the lids of his eyes rise. He stares at Rebecca with a look of frightening possibility.

  ‘I don’t want a girlfriend,’ says Justin.

  ‘I don’t want a boyfriend,’ says Rebecca.

  Am I a prostitute? thinks Rebecca. Is this how it happens? Justin takes out his wallet and hands Rebecca another twenty-pound note. The bar is really filling up, there are no girls loitering about at the back where he’s sitting any more, it’s just him and Rebecca. He feels extremely tired, as if he’s done too much and can’t even remember what he’s thinking any more.

  ‘What do you reckon? I’ll give you my number and you call me when you need me. Then I’ll see how I feel about it, see what I can do. For money.’ As she’s saying this, Rebecca begins to wonder what it is exactly she can do, and why it is she’s offering to do anything in the first place. In any case, Justin might be a serial killer. Or this might already be his fetish; getting girls to partake in grand sexual schemes under the banner of social emancipation.

  ‘I won’t shit in your mouth, Justin. Really, I won’t shit in your mouth,’ she says, as a way distancing herself a little, curbing her enthusiasm.

  ‘Yes, I know,’ says Justin, wearily, wondering what his mum would make of all this, then eventually deciding she’d be jealous. He watches, his faced scribbled out by drink, as Rebecca writes her name and number down on a piece of paper. She’s feeling annoyed and excited by the situation, intrigued by his presence and the potential sorcery she senses in him. But she’s infuriated by his fuzzy thinking and by the fact he’s fucked.

  ‘Are you Dostoevsky?’ she says quietly, more to herself than to him. It’s nine-thirty and she has a reasonable stint of nudity to get through. Justin didn’t even hear the question, too frozen and pissed. Rebecca feels Marcus’s hand on her shoulder. She looks up and he gestures towards a group of bright-red boys in nylon tracksuits of blue and green. Justin has fallen forwards, his forehead glued to the table. Two bouncers take him by each of his arms and lift him out of his chair. As Justin is dragged from the Nude Factory, Rebecca feels fingers the texture of denim drawing circles on her arse. They are just able to hear each other through the loud and terrible atmosphere.