Friction

by Joe Stretch

  She should come, thinks Johnny, she really should come. She’d texted him yesterday, they’d agreed to meet here. The text came as a surprise to Johnny, a pleasant one: is it finally time to forgive? He takes a moment to arrange the empty mug, the miniature teapot and the jug of milk neatly to one side of the table. There is a rose in a sleek glass vase. There is an old and cold chip.

  ‘Would you like another cup of tea?’

  ‘No thanks, I’m fine for the moment.’

  ‘Would you like to see a menu?’

  ‘No.’

  Since the incident with the porn mag and Zakir’s hasty departure, Johnny has been entirely alone. Thinking back, his life casually fell to pieces in a matter of hours. Two jokes, one about a twat and the other involving a surprise porno, were all it took to make him alone and pessimistic about the fifty or sixty years that may indeed be ahead of him. A birthday had passed by, his twenty-first. His mother had sent a card: the only evidence of his getting older and older.

  One thing stands between Johnny and an undeniably gloomy life: pornography. The helpfulness of pornography cannot be exaggerated; it has temporarily saved him. During a phase in his life when time threatened to pass out at the steering wheel, Johnny has been able to keep up with himself through the frequent purchase and enjoyment of porn. He has become a wanker. Pornography makes his life exciting. It fills his evenings with tension, glory and imagination. It is a reason to wake up and move about the city, to compile sexual data, attend lectures, shop. Pornography entirely makes up for the absence of friends.

  Johnny’s virginity is largely self-imposed, not by religion or anything foolish, it’s simply a biological thing. Puberty made a scarcely perceptible imprint on his brain. It half-heartedly decorated his body in wiry, insectile hair. But that was all. It failed to jerk his brain to life and fill it with the necessary shit. So for so long, girls had not been an issue. He’d not been strangled into sex like most of his peers, he had been a carefree and content young man. But this is no longer the case.

  Since coming to university and being subjected to the finest and most nubile configurations of flesh and fabric, Johnny is a wreck. He’s gasping for breath. His lack of experience with women and the untimely collapse of his relationship with Rebecca has left him lost for words. Pornography was the only route open to him and he has compiled quite a collection. To the Asian shopkeeper, he has become a phenomenal source of business and profit. At more light-hearted moments, he likes to imagine how her quality of life must have improved considerably since he began to purchase seven pornos a week from her. Perhaps she has a picture of him on her mantelpiece. Maybe her and her family thank him in prayer before each meal. He’s paying their fucking rent; putting trainers on their feet and making them rich and happy. Johnny is great business.

  Besides rejoicing in the seemingly endless line of girls who appear only too happy to remove their clothes and be photographed in a variety of poses, Johnny has become smitten with the activity of phone sex. Of course, it costs him a fortune in phone bills, but his diminished responsibility to lifestyle makes it affordable. Barely a day goes by when he doesn’t find himself crouched over his magazines, phone in hand, wanking at speed. But wait – Rebecca.

  ‘Sorry I’m late.’

  ‘Rebecca.’

  ‘The bus was a nightmare, sorry. How are you?’

  Rebecca’s arrived and her face is glowing, a red traffic light on each cheek. She takes down her hood with its fake fur trim, removes her coat completely and sighs. Winter has stabbed her to life. She’s breathless and glowing, eyes scanning the bar. Alert, clean and cold, she rubs her hands together vigorously and stares into Johnny’s eyes.

  ‘It’s been ages. What have you been up to?’ she asks, taking a seat and examining the miniature teapot for signs of tea. Johnny begins fumbling around with the mug, convinced that, once again, he will inappropriately refer to a twat. Or a cunt.

  ‘Oh, this and that, killing time. Zakir’s left so I’m living on my own at the moment.’ Johnny’s voice oscillates with agitation. Platitudes in the key of panic.

  ‘Is that not a bit lonely?’

  ‘Yes, it is.’

  A clear code of conduct exists between human beings who have got to know each other, spoken and spent time together. The streets, squares and rooms of England are often quiet and unfriendly; strangers rarely speak. But if, for some reason, you’ve come into contact with another person, then you’re obliged to try and make it work and attempt to maintain your ties. This is why we are here, in this bar. This is why the room has been gently heated and decorated. Why Johnny is hovering above Rebecca, gesturing manically – he wants to buy her a drink.

  ‘What would you like to drink?’

  ‘A cappuccino.’

  This is why coffee beans were grown and why machines that brew coffee and froth milk were researched, invented and perfected. Because people clouted together by instinct, accident or desire, must be bound to one another. We must try. This is friendship and morality. It has little to do with phone sex, and more to do with the widely held belief that loneliness is shit.

  The cappuccino arrives in a dull thud of glory. Chocolate sprinklings. A ginger light. Johnny repetitively rubs his right cheek. It’s as if he’s persecuted by some unfortunate neuroses, brought about by an awareness that life, and the things we do, are all a little crap. He’s not, of course, he’s simply riddled with nerves. He can’t believe she’s actually here, and so beautiful. This glorious moment must be taken advantage of. His personality must be articulated at pace, like a character in a short film, or one of those apartment blocks which secretly construct themselves overnight.

  ‘You know, Rebecca, I’m sorry about what I said that day. I didn’t mean to offend you, when I said I wanted to do that.’

  ‘Do what?’ says Rebecca, searching through her bag.

  ‘Hammer away at a twat,’ says Johnny, half covering his mouth with his hand.

  ‘Oh, yeh, of course, it’s fine. Don’t worry about it.’

  Prejudices, hatreds, grudges and opinions are not expected to be maintained. The standards imposed on the thoughts that people think are very lax. Opinions, like disco lights, can flash on and off, like most things they can be forgotten. So Rebecca feels no inclination to maintain her largely feigned outrage at Johnny’s use of the word twat. It was ages ago. Three months. Forget it. She leans in. She’s all smiles, health and just a glimpse of cleavage, a perspective on death.

  ‘So, go on, Johnny, it’s been ages, tell me about things.’

  ‘There’s nothing to tell.’

  ‘Why did Zakir leave?’

  ‘I’ve honestly got no idea, he just did.’

  ‘He probably realised what a retard you are. Ha.’

  ‘Yeh. Listen, Rebecca, I really wish we saw each other more often, like we used to.’

  Even boys like Johnny are capable of cutting to the chase once in a while. Course they are, how else would any of us get anywhere? So it is that he’s demanded more of Rebecca’s time, rather abruptly and out of the blue. When your life is akin to holding your breath for unnatural lengths of time, you’re likely to gasp loudly when you finally open your mouth and breathe. Johnny is brimming with pent-up society. Months of phone sex and isolated living and wanking are blowing from his jaws.

  ‘Looking back, Rebecca, you were pretty much my best mate. Offending you was a really big mistake. I didn’t mean to, I regret it.’

  ‘Oh, Johnny, you’re a sweetheart.’ Rebecca studies Johnny and thanks God she met Justin.

  ‘I think my life might be really shite,’ continues Johnny, enjoying the sensation of words passing his lips and admiring the two lines of cleavage that descend into Rebecca’s blue top, towards happiness. ‘It’s mostly shite in really big ways. I have no friends, no interests, no ambition, no love. I really—’

  Rebecca, who can’t stop thinking about Justin and how fucking brilliant he is, interrupts unconvincingly: ‘What about mates off your cour
se?’

  ‘I blew it,’ confesses Johnny. ‘Things go so fast and I just missed out. Honestly, please, what do you do with your time, Rebecca?’

  The coffee machine coughs and a plate is placed on an adjacent table, stacked high with focaccia and fries. Eyes widen and the door clatters and vibrates in its effort to repel the cold. The bar’s rammed with civilisation and its pendulous moods; its absurd and twisting periods of emotion, event and despair. We have arrived at some poorly signposted junction in Earth’s existence, when people can do little but pay their rent and sit at tables, order drinks and chew Italian bread to mush. Who is remembering all this?

  ‘I’ve met this lad.’

  ‘A lad?’

  ‘Yes. Actually, Johnny, there’s something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about.’

  Johnny leans forward so far he could comfortably dribble spit into Rebecca’s cappuccino. He doesn’t. But he im agines that glorious moment when Rebecca decided there was something that she wanted to talk to him about. How is he manifested in her brain? he wonders. A cloud of dust, perhaps, a drop of fluid, a ghost. How he would love to be exactly who Rebecca thinks he is, even if it were bad, at least he would be simple and still.

  ‘Justin and I,’ Rebecca begins, her voice betraying enthusiasm for the first time, ‘we’re experimenting, trying to find better sex. As a virgin, and a person who clearly has had few sexual opportunities, you’d be really useful to us.’

  Johnny feels certain traits of his personality evaporate and exit with a hiss from each of his ears. I shall never be funny again, he confirms with a smirk. ‘I’m not a virgin,’ he suggests, causing Rebecca to erupt with self-interest.

  ‘Yes, Johnny, you are. Don’t be ashamed. We’re trying to liberate ourselves from these dire sexual shackles binding everyone nowadays. We’re finding out where we’d be and what we’d be like if we actually did what culture is daring us to do.’

  ‘What is culture daring us to do, Rebecca?’

  Rebecca bows her head and looks up, her pupils peeping at Johnny from underneath her forehead and the plucked ridges of her eyebrows.

  ‘Culture, Johnny,’ she says, the mug poised at her lips, ‘is daring us to do what the fuck we like.’

  She sips from her drink and glances over to an area by a window where it’s lighter and people are laughing and enjoying themselves. She is unrecognisable from the girl Johnny first fell in love with. She is on a mission. She behaves as if her head is stacked with secrets that she must never share but only allude to charismatically. She blinks and her eyes return to Johnny’s. ‘I could fuck you for instance, Johnny. Justin could just watch, or, we could have a threesome. We take it very seriously, we’ve even got a website.’

  ‘You could fuck me?’ says Johnny, confused by the smut his beautiful friend is spouting. She leans towards him, displaying the sort of faux-importance that only a lifetime spent in front of a television can generate.

  ‘We’re amassing experience. Me fucking a virgin would be one such experience. I may find that I adore the feeling, you just never know. You should visit the website.’ Rebecca takes out a piece of paper and a pen from her bag. She jots down the address of Justin’s website: newsex.biz. This is a very common activity. Lately, if you don’t have a website then you’re basically a total tit. Johnny speaks, but Rebecca doesn’t listen. This is common, too. Although even if you don’t listen, you can still be fairly cool.

  ‘But you’d be with me. I really like you, Rebecca,’ says Johnny, one eye on his personality, as it disappears into an airvent. But no, Rebecca finishes writing down the address and then slides it over to Johnny, reaching for her cappuccino as she does so.

  Oh, they talk. Naturally, they blah-blah for a bit. This and that. On and on. Yes, in reality (ha, what a fate!), they talk for a little while longer. But who remembers? Really? Who remembers? I do not.

  For your own benefit, try to imagine that after this exchange time mysteriously accelerates, life fast-forwards itself to the moment when Johnny and Rebecca separate outside the bar. In reality, yes, they talk for half an hour. But the topics they cover are fairly dull. The whole occasion lives in the shadow of Rebecca’s suggestion that she takes Johnny’s virginity as part of an elaborate and fairly vague social experiment.

  Johnny, in particular, fails to make much sense of the occasion after listening to Rebecca’s proposal. His eyes glaze as she talks about a French writer she’s recently developed an interest in, Michel Something or other. Johnny can’t believe what she has just suggested. He can’t believe how vulgar love can be. Because he does love Rebecca, sexual experiment or not. He loves like we all love. But he’s disgusted by her proposal, by the whole idea of the experiment. Who is this lad anyway? This Justin? How can Johnny’s mind churn out affection for this repulsive girl? Jesus, love is like drinking formaldehyde, or dipping your scalp in water that will soon turn to ice. How can I cope with this? thinks Johnny.

  They separate outside the bar. Rebecca skips in the direction of a braking bus, arm outstretched and hailing. She’s off to God knows where; to fuck a horse, to shag a corpse. Johnny’s got no idea. He’s on Wilmslow Road, roughly grappling with a series of contradictions in his head. Of course, he’s seen films. I know what romance is, he thinks. And it’s got nothing to do with experiments or virgins, horses, chains or piss. Yes, I know what romance is and I want it. His brain bellows towards the south of his body, echoing around his torso and down his acoustic ribcage. His eyes go wide. I need to be in love.

  In light of Johnny’s belief in romance and his faith in the idea that other people, specifically girls, are capable of being tear-jerkingly wonderful, it’s annoying that Rebecca has soiled her image by propositioning him. If this was a film, and the two of them were facing each other on a moonlit coastal veranda, then Johnny might say this:

  ‘You were everything to me, Rebecca, you know? I would have done anything to be . . . to be . . . to be with you.’

  But this isn’t a film and Rebecca’s nowhere near the sea. She’s on a bus heading north up Wilmslow Road. Johnny’s on Egerton Road, trapped in the suburbs, wondering whether the fact he’s been alive for twenty-one years qualifies him as an adult. Were his parents in love? Did their eyes well up with tears at the thought of making a child and spending their lives together? Did they love the idea of buying a house, partaking in daily rituals, nights of passion, looking after each other? Is my lanky frame capable of letting me live and be happy? I’m so tall, thinks Johnny. My face is not right, somebody got me wrong, made me badly. Will I really live to be sixty or seventy years old? I just don’t see how. God? It makes no sense. I want a fire to sit by. A rug. A hot drink. A conversation. A girl to devote myself to, please, this is so ugly and I’m so lonely. She wants to have sex with me because I’m a virgin. She wants to take me, guide me. Would we kiss?

  I won’t do it, thinks Johnny, as the front door shuts and the throaty desire to wank fizzes up his cock, over his chest, and up his spine to his mind. Lonely and desperate as I am, I won’t do it. She is lost, but I have a brain and I’m not disabled. I can find my way out of this dark winter. I’ll find my way to beautiful, expansive terrain, where people discover shared interests. Where people are perplexed by an immediate and tacit attraction to one another. Where people make love and make the most of each other. I just want love.

  Johnny walks down the hall and removes the cordless phone from its cradle. It has been charging, conserving energy. He’s climbing the stairs, stooping because he’s tall and depressed. He feels that Rebecca has got it all wrong, feels her whole project sounds a little trendy and political. Love, that’s what will remove us from this culture of sex, mindless masturbation and slavery. He removes the two most recent pornos from his underwear drawer and throws them on to his unmade bed. They’re bright and new. Love is the answer. Thank God for pornography.

  He begins to turn the pages, kneeling by his bed like a child preparing to pray. There is a foolproof formula for the photographi
ng of women for the purposes of male masturbation. Each photograph must refer clearly to a specific mode of intercourse or foreplay. A crouch and a gaping mouth says blow job, naturally. An arched back and a protruding rear says doggy or anal. It’s child’s play. The necessary nudges and prompts for a primitive and electric imagination. Johnny skips calmly from page to page until each magazine is catering for the majority of his sexual desires. A black girl’s pussy stares at the camera, this takes care of race and doggy. There’s a blonde with a glint of oral sex in her eye. A brunette’s face suggests personality and gentleness. In addition, her legs are open wide and her breasts are huge. Finally, Johnny locates a good tit-bra – his favourite pose. A tit-bra occurs when two girls touch their tits together, meaning that each set of tits is supported by the other. Yes, I love a good tit-bra, thinks Johnny. At last, the age of the tit-bra is here. Ha, you don’t believe it, but it’s true. This is it. Monsters. Monsters.

  Johnny has his preferred sex line on speed dial. A flick of the finger and it’s ringing. Flies lowered, cock hard, love and life, love and life, hurrah, hurrah. Not too fast, now: you’ll come before you hear her voice.

  ‘Hello,’ says a voice, female and cracked.

  ‘Hello,’ says Johnny.

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘It’s . . . er . . . Dave.’

  ‘Hello, honey, how you doing?’

  ‘Fine, fine, I’m OK. How are you?’

  ‘I’m OK. How old are you, Dave baby?’

  ‘Twenty-three.’

  ‘Do you work, Dave?’

  ‘Yes! I . . . er . . . work in a Boots.’

  ‘Oooh, I love Boots. The chemist, right?’

  ‘Yeah!’

  It is not yet evening, but the light outside suggests that somebody has attached a lampshade to the sun. Phone sex is a popular form of sex. It plays second fiddle to the Internet, but it’s still a widely enjoyed romance. It is a laceration through a lonely world; past all the lines, the airs and the barriers. Past the bullshit that prevents easy and impromptu dialogue between people. These girls are paid to talk. These men, oh, these men. Their hearts will smudge and be destroyed if they’re denied the sound of a woman speaking.