by Joe Stretch
If Zakir takes offence, Johnny will claim that he thought he was acting in Zakir’s best sexual interests. He will claim that he felt that Zakir had hinted that he might want to look at a porn magazine, that it was all a very unfortunate misunderstanding. A practical joke. They aren’t friends, there is nothing to lose. But, nevertheless, Johnny tries to think of ways in which his actions might be considered to be a practical joke. It’s unlikely. Zakir will most likely be offended, or, at best, perplexed. One thing is for sure: it is a reckless and cruel decision that has resulted in Razzle resting under Zakir’s pillow. This house on Kingswood Road will never be the same again.
‘Yeeeeeeeesssssssssssss! Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeessssssssssss!’ screams Zakir, first at the TV and then at Johnny. A goal, a goal, a goal. He goes football crazy, football mad. Neither of them realises that they are, in effect, entering the final minutes of their naff friendship. Zakir dances around the living room. He grabs Johnny by the wrists and tries to lead him in a merry dance. Johnny’s brain disconnects from his skull and gets lodged in his neck. Upstairs, under Zakir’s pillow, inside the poor porno, the girls wait, pussies prised. Mental note: total twat.
Tonight the porn mag will poison the house with honesty, bad taste and ignorant reality. Nothing will be said, or openly discussed, but the innocent porno will give birth to silence and tension. Pointlessness will reign and Johnny will cower in a bad light. Zakir will discover the glossed pages and flick through them in disbelief. Johnny, he will think, this could only have been Johnny. Tomorrow, Johnny will notice fire in Zakir’s eyes. He will fear retribution, an act of domestic terrorism; a toaster in the bath, a knife in the back.
Zakir will leave the house within the month to live with someone else. A kinder, cleverer, more articulate person, he hopes. I imagine.
Johnny is a nobody.
Tonight he will have his first sex with a porno. Dramatic masturbation. Amateur romance.
But Johnny is a nobody.
A story.
Forget it.
13
The Hump
COLIN PLACES HIS beer on the table and takes a seat next to Boy 2, opposite Boy 1. The three of them often meet for drinks after work. When it’s sunny, like today, they come to Deansgate Locks, to The Bar, or Revolution. It’s nice to sit outside as the sun sets. It’s a lovely activity.
The initial motivation for these after-work drinks was an attempt to replicate American leisure. If television is to be believed, which it is, then Americans enjoy carelessly rendezvousing with buddies after work to discuss labour, love and each other. All three lads secretly admire the brightly coloured people on American television. All of them are tied to specific establishments where they’re known and can enjoy themselves by bantering with their friends. A coffeehouse, a bar, a bowling alley. Anywhere that a micro-community can be fostered and a sense of optimism and friendship can be allied to the sale of snacks and drinks.
Naturally, the efforts of Boy 2, Boy 1 and Colin never quite achieve the delightful and hilarious heights of American friendships. And, of course, they can hardly compete with relationships depicted on TV, only aspire to them. But they enjoy these moments nonetheless, particularly when the sun is out and they can think of things to talk about.
There is something in Colin’s eye. He pulls at the lower lid then plunges his finger right into the corner where a small triangle of red exists. It’s gone. He blinks and stares down at the canal which runs alongside the bars and restaurants of Deansgate Locks. He hasn’t touched his beer. Boy 1 and Boy 2 discuss the match.
‘I only saw the second half.’
‘They should have lost. England were fucking shit.’
My God, England is relaxed. It’s like the chill-out room of an unfashionable club. Boy 1 and Boy 2 discuss a dubious case of offside in last night’s game. Colin drifts. He doesn’t listen when Boy 2 claims to have fingered a girl in the pub in which he watched the match. ‘Under the table,’ Boy 2 explains, ‘I finger-fucked her.’ But no one ever believes Boy 2. He’s a dick.
Around 1992, some scholars suggest that History has come to an end. In 2001, however, the issue of global terror nudged History back to life. Nowadays, it proceeds in unspectacular fairy steps. Political periods come and go, offering crises, war and upheaval, but they lack dynamism and impact. They do nothing to stem the drip-drip of neutered, empty time. We’re quietly drowning. Help. Items on the news will always try and garner evidence to the contrary, but it just isn’t true. They find evidence of escalating drug abuse, depression, terror, clashes of civilisations and political dissatisfaction, but most viewers are alienated by this culture of doom and gloom. The shiny lives led by the living contrast awkwardly with the forecasting of apocalypse and societal collapse. Nobody sees it coming.
It was in America and Germany from 1890 to 1915 that industrial innovators invented methods aimed at increasing the energy efficiency of their work force. The aim was to make work less tiring and give workers enough energy to approach their leisure time with vigour and imagination. The plan worked. It spread across Europe. As the twenty-first century irons its shirt, checks its hair and prepares to go out pubbing and clubbing, leisure time is the only real time. Very few people break a sweat at work. Most get dangerously bored, but few find themselves lacking in enthusiasm when it comes to charging headlong into a period of leisure. Leisure is what people live for, what people do, how people behave and how they wear themselves out.
‘I swear, she let me. My finger stank of fish.’
Take the three gentlemen at this table, sipping expensive lager and twitching self-consciously in response to small changes in their environment. All three watch in silence as new sets of people come and go. They strain to hear the conversations of others around them. They’re fascinated, surprisingly ignorant of the ways in which other people pass their time.
For Boys 1 and 2, situations like this still possess a sexual dimension. They starve after the flesh that tenses and perspires around them: the businesswomen in grey suits and shiny shoes. The beautiful girls who come from the salons and boutiques of the city centre in search of eligible men with money, style and good cars. Boy 1 has eyes capable of burning the clothes off passing girls. A one-track mind. Laser lust. A reflex to incorporate these strangers into a thousand fantasies, contort them into innumerable shapes.
For Colin, of course, the situation is different. He stays alert. His thoughts shudder and shake. His brain threatens to send him spinning round sabotaging these sick, sick women. These dead and buried men. Colin makes do, spends time cautiously, relax, relax.
‘I was thinking we should go down the hospital again tomorrow. Get some breakfast. It was a fucking laugh that, wannit?’ says Colin, lighting a cigarette. He inhales and watches his friends closely, already irritated by the indifference and surprise he expects his suggestion to be met with. He exhales.
‘Yeh, it was fucking funny,’ says Boy 2, sniffing the index finger of his right hand.
‘Gimme a fag, Colin. Look at that bird,’ says Boy 1, reaching over and taking Colin’s cigarettes from him. Despite their similar names, Boy 1 and Boy 2 are quite different. Boy 2 is a dick. Whereas Boy 1 is, well, he’s more of a bastard. He’s currently standing with an unlit fag swinging from his lips, tapping his groin in the direction of a tall girl with extremely short bleached blond hair and a top that reveals a triangle of each of her tits. Colin watches him with disgust. ‘I’m not gonna look at the fucking bird, Boy 1.’
‘Fuck off, Colin.’ Boy 1 stops tapping his crotch. The girl’s gone anyway. He pulls a questioning face, his eyes unnaturally wide, prompting Colin to fix him with a squinted stare just long enough for Boy 1 to remember the bad times and what Colin’s capable of.
‘All right, Col, calm down. I’m up for going to the hospital again. It was fucking funny.’
Silence once more. My God this is a quiet affair, surely there must be something to say. The bar sounds like a stream trickling over rocks. It’s full of people talking
gently about today. I don’t know what the date is exactly, but it’s summer. A day. With weather, news, television, tasks, a mood, a place in our hearts.
‘It’s getting boring. It’s just girls-fucking-girls with you, isn’t it, Boy 1?’ says Colin, vigorously spinning the wheel of his lighter over and over again.
‘Well yeh, actually. It is just girls, mate.’
Colin is forced to backtrack. He slides the lighter across the table towards Boy 1. The rot must be hidden. The decay must remain unseen; internal, structural. It’s only a matter of time before Boy 1 is able to subvert the hierarchy of these three and challenge Colin’s leadership. End his reign. Colin is aware of this. Aware that his position is being compromised by his need to stay calm and protect the world from his anger and his smouldering, ignorant unease. He must try to take care of his rage. What might Boy 1 do? wonders Colin. The most logical thing for Boy 1 to do is call Colin a ‘total puff’. Total puffs, you understand, as Colin does, don’t shag many birds.
Colin swigs from his pint, swallows and coughs deep into his hand. No matter, he thinks, none of this matters.
It’s no secret that the Wishing Well and the hospital it feeds are of significance to this tale. It’s obvious. It’s where Colin’s head began to ache. Colin, who is crimson-brained and vital. Tomorrow morning these three boys will return to the café. They will each eat a fried breakfast in the company of victims of cancer and women who are tantalisingly close to giving birth. As they finish their food and one by one position their cutlery in the middle of their plates, Boy 2 will wonder out loud: ‘Does your knob prod the kid if you fuck a pregnant bird?’
Of course, Boy 2 is a dick and he will say this too loudly. A group of women will raise eyebrows and look with disapproval and fear at this strange group of young men. What are three young men doing in the Wishing Well anyway? they will think. Perhaps their relatives are dying. Maybe a mutual friend has taken too many drugs, overdosed, his stomach is being pumped in some other part of the hospital.
‘Shut up, Boy 2!’ Colin, by now, will be fixated. Fascinated by form. The wide groaning curves of the women: sturdy, delicate, aliens, bearers. These secret miracles, what do they mean? Is it his own ignorance or does society somehow keep the birth of its children a secret? Something to be hidden and not thought about too graphically or realistically? Pregnancy existed on TV, of course, but not like this. Not the calm, musical elegance that these women possess. It’s as if their bodies sing gentle, amazing melodies. Their beauty and simplicity mocks the world, which is inane, bawdy and pretentious. Seeing all these pregnant women exerts a power of asphyxiation over Colin. He can’t breathe. He can’t stop thinking about them. There is something in all this. Those large stomachs. Calm expressions. What is it? Ah, what is it?
For Boy 1, the pregnancies are like flashing lights. Red. Danger. Something to be avoided. Something that happens when recreation fucks up and life bursts with a bang. Bang! Everything changes and you find yourself in deep shit. He’d fuck a pregnant bird, but only for the thrill, only because pregnant or otherwise, it’s still a fuck. A conquest, a memory, a victory. He will lean backwards on his chair and push his empty plate to the centre of the cheap table. His mouth will open.
‘You have to do it up the arse. Either way it’d be fucked up. Massive nipples, though – bonus.’
‘Yeh, I get it, the hump’d get in the way.’
‘They’ve all just been fucked by some stupid dickhead anyway. Then after the sprog, they’ve got bucket fannies, so it’s shit.’
Colin will watch in silence, angry at what is being said but unable to see beyond it. He wants to break their logic and find comfort, a way forward. He has seen something new and he does not know what to do.
As the boys carefully retrace their steps down the stony grey stairwell of the hospital, where the air smells of hot water and chemicals, Colin’s brain will crank and spit out an idea. Quit your job at the university, Colin, his navy-blue brain will whisper. Why not? Quit your job and work here. Clean. Be a doctor. Work at the café. Anything. Just work here. Dear Colin, Colin who burns alive and has no idea why, his mind fat as fuck with distortion and stupidity, quit your job, dip-shit. Work at the hospital.
But that’s not now, that’s later, tomorrow. Right now we’re still outside The Bar. We’re sipping, living, quietly. Colin sits in silence, deep in thought, only pregnancy on his mind. A breeze is sending a shiver through the crowd. Men look up at the sky and consider taking their drinks inside. Might it rain?
14
Financial Times
‘IT’S ME.’
The intercom buzzes. The lock on the front entrance is released. Carly pushes at the door with her back, both hands are full of shopping bags. She’s not nervous. The foyer to Steve’s apartment block is well lit.
She pushes Steve’s front door open and walks into the centre of the open-plan living space. Steve is lifting weights in front of a mirror. His elbow rests on his endless knee. A dumb-bell rises and falls. Carly stares into the mirror and catches the reflection of Steve’s eye. The TV is tuned to a music channel; classic hits of the 1980s.
‘Hey, you,’ says Carly.
Steve says nothing. He allows his head to drop and stares downwards at his arm, full of strain.
‘Are you mad?’ Carly asks, placing the many bags of shopping on to the breakfast bar. ‘I mean about the money,’ she continues, catching a glimpse of a pink pashmina inside one of the bags, and wincing with affection.
‘What did you get?’ Words hiss out from between Steve’s gritted teeth. The dumb-bell rises, then pauses, as if the weight itself is intrigued as to what Carly spends money on.
‘Clothes.’
Steve puts down the weights and collapses his body on to the sofa to read the Financial Times. This is a tactic of basic alienation. Carly doesn’t read newspapers. Don’t go to the breakfast bar, thinks Steve, if you go to the breakfast bar blow jobs will occur. Stay quiet. She robbed you. Anal is justice.
For a while Carly flits about the flat, unpacking her shopping and pouring herself a drink. She smokes. Pausing occasionally to enjoy a particularly good song from the eighties. Madonna. Michael Jackson. Wham! Steve stares at the pink pages of the Financial Times. Pink seems an appropriate colour. Somehow false, deceiving, perfect for pansy investors. Pages one to four are devoted to the Autopen Corporation and the Autopen Relentless Bliss.
‘Did you go to Versus?’ Steve asks, as he reads yet another account of the unprecedented rise in the Autopen share prices.
‘Why would I go there when I’ve got you?’ asks Carly, the slightly flat notes of a lie ruining the pitch of her voice.
Steve says nothing. He turns over another pink leaf.
‘Oh, Stevie, don’t be mad at me, baby.’
Carly dives on to the sofa, swims under the Financial Times and surfaces under Steve’s jaw, which she kisses. It’s all like a children’s story, a simple tale of morality and good behaviour. Carly realises she must be seen to be learning, just as Steve, as the moral centre and judge, realises he must be seen to be teaching. His eyes are fixed like nails on the newspaper. He follows the statistics and the articles purely for show. Purely to show that in some small yet significant way, he’s capable of deliberately isolating himself from this girl and the moments of glad, calming ecstasy she is still able to deliver. It feels as if he should sigh then tut, so he sighs then tuts.
‘I’m sorry, Stevie, I dunno what I was doing. I can take it all back, I kept the receipts.’
The Financial Times is calmly closed, folded and put to one side. Steve is enormous, beautiful, a cherub. He looks at Carly and, with a softening of his eyes, is able to communicate to her his anger, his desire for justice, but also his compassion and his ability to forgive. He watches a wave of comprehension break on her face and becomes aware that for the next hour, at least, he is permitted to behave in accordance with his own real wants. Carly sighs. Steve realises that his life is one of ever diminishing use.
The kind of game a child might play.
‘Don’t fuck about with my money again, Carly.’
Steve’s voice is deep, slow and serious. He is a cowboy. A maverick. A loveable villain. All the roles and fantasies usually denied to him by Carly and her neon-lit confidence. He sniffs air hard through his nostrils. He is a Russian assassin, KGB, as capable of thunder and lightning love as he is of exact, businesslike murder. His left hand comes flying in from his side and grips Carly’s chin, his right bulldozes its way under her arm to its pit. Carly finds herself being pushed upwards towards the edge of the sofa, but she always supposed such acts of physical contortion would play a part in her forgiveness.
‘Do you understand? I don’t want to be fucked about like this ever again,’ he says, as if he could clench his fist and immediately punch her hard in the eye. He won’t, of course, only dreams of it, but he enjoys reacquainting his demeanour with violence and anger. Enjoys seeing specks of fear in Carly’s shining eyes. ‘I won’t, honey,’ she says, ‘you know I won’t. I love you.’
I LIKE TO MOVE IT MOVE IT, I LIKE TO MOVE IT MOVE IT, I LIKE TO MOVE IT MOVE IT, YOU LIKE TO. MOVE IT. In the control room of whatever music channel is whistling to itself on Steve’s television, the eighties end and the classic songs of the early nineties take to the screen. I LIKE TO MOVE IT MOVE IT. The beat drops and Steve leans forward, kissing Carly with aggression to the rhythm of the music. I LIKE TO MOVE IT MOVE IT. Steve feels his thorny chin scraping and rubbing at Carly’s skin. This is reconciliation and the kissing must be firm and confrontational, on his part at least. She must accept whatever moods and techniques he chooses to adopt.
The room screws itself up. Beats and melodies of the nineties mingle with the twenty-first-century furnishings and with the bodies and the lips and with the lights, which seem to flash, as Carly brings Steve’s hand slamming into her left tit. What fiends we are.