Friction

by Joe Stretch

  ‘I think he might hurt her,’ says Justin, harshly, desperate to make Frank see the serious side of this. Frank’s hands meet in the middle of his chest, resting on his huge gut. Fingers fiddling with each other. His smile flickering like a looped image, cycling unrealistically.

  ‘I’m afraid I shan’t get involved, Justin,’ he says, slowly and almost seriously. ‘I must maintain a distance from your other activities, for the sake of the White Love brand and our business venture. We really shouldn’t meet in person any more.’

  ‘She might die, Frank.’ Justin grabs Frank’s arm and instantly regrets having done so; it feel like a bladder. But there’s no convincing Frank. He doesn’t like saving people because he’s a twat.

  ‘I’m sorry, Justin, but I shan’t get involved. I’m making you a great deal of money. You’ll have half a million on the first month’s sales alone. It really is my time at last.’

  Justin’s halfway through figuring out why half a million quid means nothing to him when the front door bursts with neon yellow. He takes the long way round Frank and walks towards the police.

  ‘I’ll take care of Steve, my boy. Good luck,’ shouts Frank over his huge shoulder.

  Justin doesn’t listen. He approaches an officer with his arms outstretched. The officer frowns.

  ‘It’s gonna take at least an hour to get this crowd dispersed, son.’

  31

  Darling Death

  IT’S HAPPENING. REBECCA bleeds and Colin kicks, Steve is mad and Justin’s trapped. And Carly, dear Carly, is where she has been for several months now: locked in the Green Quarter apartment with the Sex Machine.

  After hours with the machine, Carly hums while breathing. She’s too weak to separate her lips. She draws air in through the sides of her mouth then releases it slowly though her nostrils with a high-pitched and wistful hum.

  She slowly removes each of the pleasure-pads from her body. Smoke rises from her nipples as she frees them from the machine’s electric grip. The skin between her legs is scorched black. Her hair is falling out. From certain angles she looks noticeably bald, her enlarged forehead falls like melted wax to her patchy eyebrows. Then her eyes, hollowed hard; lids the texture of biscuits.

  ‘Oh, darling,’ she murmurs, entwining her legs among the wires and straps of the Sex Machine – darling: White Love 1000.

  She hasn’t left the house in six weeks. She barely eats. Her limbs are flesh golf clubs, hardly capable of allowing her to stagger out of the bedroom. Frank has masterminded the cover-up operation. He can’t afford bad press in the months prior to the UK launch of the White Love 1000. And Carly is certainly bad press. Her parents were told she had a sudden attack of moral heartache and that she’s currently involved in aid work in Sudan. But she isn’t, not at all. She lying on her bed waiting for her body to cool down. So she can start again.

  A layer of dust has settled on the room. A layer of grey on the always-silent hi-fi and the abandoned screen of the television. Where did all this come from? wonders Carly, utterly confused by everything but the machine. Steve is rarely here. He’s always out, she knows not where. She is always in. There’s no other way to describe this place. It is Carly’s lair.

  She scurries to the floor, leaving the machine to recover on the bed. ‘Distraction,’ she whispers. ‘I need distraction.’

  After using the machine Carly has to find ways of killing time. Ideally she’d never turn it off, but in rare logical moments she knows her skin would blacken further and it’s likely she’d pass out. So she must try to give herself periods of recovery.

  She crawls to her dressing table and begins fondling the objects that she finds there. She can’t remember many of their names. She knows that the small bottle containing thick pink liquid had something to do with her fingers. But she can’t think what. The colours of her make-up seem awkward to her now. She reads their names and wonders what it was she had once seen in the various shades. 314 Hot Lilac. 28 Sheer Blossom. 49 Violet Magnetique. 30 Foxy Lady.

  She throws the make-up down and pulls open a drawer. Inside she finds a stack of greasy paper. She knows what this is. She’s sure she’s seen it before. She smells it and feels her memory returning, it smells of stale sweat. But, no, she can’t think. Can’t remember. Each sheet is incredibly creased, somehow memorably. There are different colours, immense amounts of detail on each side. She compares the different designs, lines them up and stares. But it’s useless. She can’t work out how they could possibly be used.

  ‘Twenty pounds,’ she reads from one, the words awkward on her tongue. ‘Twenty pounds,’ she says again, allowing the piece of paper to fall.

  It was the boredom, of course, the absence of anything else to do. That’s what caused this. And then it was that delicious desire for more that we shivering idiots possess. After all, birth then death is a fairly old-fashioned sequence of events. It’s only proper to punctuate it with years of heightened pleasure. So Carly allowed the Sex Machine to electrocute her for increasingly long periods of time. Hours on end.

  But it wasn’t love of sex that brought Carly to this situation, nor was it love of orgasm, really. It was that colourless sludge. Existence: that feigned yawn. The surprising tedium that draws thin cotton curtains around your brain and makes life seem like an inconsequential disaster. You know? Being alive. Socialising, knowing people. Things like that.

  Carly was so sensationally bored. Baffled by the world of bombs, speeches and ambition. Gutless in the face of a planet dilly-dallying with effort and energy.

  Beside the bed now, Carly discovers a band of silver metal around one of her toes. She pulls it off and holds it to the light. It seems so useless, she thinks, what could this possibly be for? She climbs on to the bed and drapes herself lovingly over the machine. So much greater than cock and balls, thinks Carly. No more grunts and clumsy thumbs. She looks down at her blackened chest and at the areas of her body that no longer recognise touch. Darling doesn’t mind. Darling doesn’t care what you look like and nor does death. Her mind empties. She begins to attach the machine. She hates men. Cockless arseholes. Carly only likes incessant fatal orgasm. Put simply, she was bored and liked sex machines. Now she’s burnt black by their effects.

  32

  Sundried Eyes

  THE DELICIOUS SOFT dough of the panini absorbs the blood from around Rebecca’s mouth. But her jaw won’t work; it refuses to accommodate the food that Colin prods her with.

  ‘Eat, Rebecca, eat your lovely food.’

  Colin’s eyes are frozen wide, stuck in an expression of foul surprise. He repeatedly pushes the panini at her lips, staining the food with a thick mix of blood and lipstick. Rebecca’s throat pulsates in a cycle of small gags, the sharp scent of pesto scraping the walls of her nostrils.

  Giving up on Rebecca momentarily, Colin takes a large tear at the panini with his teeth, colouring them a glassy red. With his jaw munching up the food, he kneels and brings his face close to Rebecca’s. She can’t see because her eyes won’t open. Her lulled senses just recognise the sound of chomping and the deep bassy curdling of Colin’s Adam’s apple. She wishes he’d start reading the magazines again, give her a moment of peace.

  But instead she feels the cold drip of liquid on her face, landing on her cheeks like light pin pricks. She’s reminded of time, how it sort of drips, how it’s running out. Colin’s holding sundried tomatoes above her head and allowing their oil to fall on to her face, watching it slide though the creases of her skin and into her cuts.

  Irritated by her lack of consciousness, he pulls at the lids of Rebecca’s eyes and looks into the shocked, stationary pupils underneath. But he can’t hold her gaze. Her pupils fall upwards as if she’s straining to stare at the roof of her skull.

  ‘Ears working, are they, Rebecca? You bitch.’

  Colin lets her eyelids fall, then with steady hands he places a dainty tomato on to each of her eyes. Rebecca doesn’t notice, maybe she feels a coolness around the eyes, soothing perhaps. But sh
e doesn’t move. She is a dead ogre with red, wet, pippy peepers. Colin sits back on the edge of the bath. He picks up a magazine and tries with difficulty to get the blood from his hands with the glossed paper of the front cover.

  ‘This is a nice little ending, just as it should be. Sundried tomato and a good magazine.’

  His voice is full of flat jarring notes. Fizzy and deep. Rebecca coughs a minuscule cough. Colin flicks through the magazine until he settles on a page. He reads it aloud, pink dribble seeping from the corner of his mouth.

  ‘For most people, breast enhancement marks the beginning of a sexier, more confident life. But not for Lianne Buckell, who travelled to Los Angeles to have her A cup transformed to a double D. All had gone smoothly until the flight home, where her boyfriend Gerrard picks up the story. “They were looking brilliant, really American, higher and firmer than most British boob jobs. I just couldn’t wait to get my hands on them. But then I woke up suddenly from a kip on the plane to what sounded like an explosion. At first I thought it was terrorism, which is bad enough, but then I saw the blood and the blubber, and I realised that Lianne’s tits had exploded over us both.”’

  Colin stops, suddenly bored, then roughly turns over three or four pages and once again begins to read.

  ‘“I caught my husband in bed with my mother-in-law”.’ He spits a cherry red gloop on to the bathroom floor. Another page is turned.

  ‘“My boyfriend only wants anal” . . . “Why is he obsessed with tits?” . . . “Him and his rugby buddies took it in turns” . . . “My ten-year-old raped my best friend”.’ Colin’s reading manically. Rebecca is incapable of reacting. ‘Wake up, Rebecca! I’m reading at your funeral . . . “My Internet fuck buddy” . . . “Why my dad and I made love”.’

  Colin stuffs another slab of poisoned panini into his mouth: chorizo. Mozzarella is spilling from his mouth; crumbs suicide from his gob as he barks.

  ‘“Hollywood’s golden couple are on the rocks” . . . “Where to find the style queen’s look” . . . “The perfect blow job” . . . “What to do when you can’t be satisfied” . . . “Make him jealous” . . . “How to tell when you’ve been betrayed”.’ Colin glares at Rebecca, then screams: ‘What to do when you can’t be satisfied!’

  On and on. Colin’s voice enters Rebecca’s ears, it rattles around among the delicate bones and the tubes and blows faintly towards her brain. She pictures the interior of Justin’s car, the vanilla newness of it all, the splash-effect upholstery and his pale, steady hands.

  33

  The Jam Jar

  JUSTIN SPEEDS DOWN Princess Parkway with the radio blaring, smash hits seething from his car speakers. I CAN DRIVE A CAR AND I CAN FALL IN LOVE. Does he really listen to that crap? Oh, yes, of course he does. Because from this moment on, life must have a spell bindingly appropriate soundtrack. It’s civilisation. It has brought us Lycra skin and polymer eyes. Look pleased.

  Justin left the Malmaison under police escort. Some protesters had loitered about waiting for him. A woman waved a jam-jarred foetus into his face and several others pointed, not sure what to say while so close to the beast.

  Justin looked at each of the protesters closely. He felt he ought to make the effort to seem interested, to acknowledge their hatred and horror. The jam-jar lady had a long white scar which travelled from her forehead down to where her pink lips curled, then onwards towards a congregation of blemishes on her chin. Justin found it captivating. Like a little history running down her face – one of civilisation’s smaller stories. A moment of anger or just a silly accident. But frankly, the woman seemed a little lost for words. A little embarrassed to be waving a foetus in the face of a young man. When everything is finished, when the sex machines are winning and the foetuses are all in jam jars, then, well, I don’t know – the only thing that ever remains is the shame.

  But anyway. Justin is in his car, motor raging like a child imitating a car engine. I mean, the motor zooms like a distorted siren. He’s going fast, his eyes fixed on the road, his body hunched forward attempting to make the car move more quickly. He jumps a set of red lights and turns left on to Mauldeth Road East. He takes a deep breath; he’s a minute from Colin’s house. Rebecca. I CAN DRIVE A CAR AND I CAN FALL IN LOVE.

  34

  Super Slut

  BY THE TIME Frank gets to room 16 at the Malmaison, Steve has already left. So Frank orders an enormous braised steak from room service and sits down to await its arrival.

  Luckily, I know what all these creatures get up to. I know exactly what happened to Steve. He left the Malmaison via the back door, where he couldn’t believe his eyes; he retched at the sight of the protesting crowd, his eyes still red with tears.

  ‘Don’t look at me!’ he screamed as he threw himself into the front of the crowd, feeling the warmth of the other people heating his face, their placards scraping at his clothes.

  ‘Fashion! Fashion! Fashion!’ he squealed as the crowd’s gaze hit him like a high-speed train. He thrashed his body wildly and the crowd parted in front of him. Young children screaming ‘MURDERER’ were steered away from the strangely attired, whirling young man.

  It was only when he was finally through the crowd that he realised he’d lost his Stetson. He looked over his shoulder at the swarm of protesters; there was no going back. He dropped to his knees and wretched again on to the pavement, this time coughing up small pieces of moistureless gunk.

  ‘Excuse me there, but are you all right?’

  A protester bent down beside him and began patting him curiously on the head. A man with a banner which read ‘I STILL BELIEVE IN THE FAMILY’.

  ‘Please don’t look at me,’ said Steve, refusing to turn his gaze from the pavement and the contents of his stomach. But the man was persistent, as moralists often are.

  ‘But you’re OK, are you?’

  Steve looked at the man’s face, something he hadn’t done in weeks. Actually looked at someone. He was about fifty. His eyes were flanked with wrinkled skin, the texture of a scrotum. As he squinted, the mottled layers gathered up, each wrinkled layer on top of the next like a neat pile of dying skin. His eyes were coated with a thin white membrane, like milk spilt on glass. The turquoise of his irises was barely visible.

  ‘I’ve lost my hat,’ said Steve, recalling his delightful Stetson and the happiness it had brought.

  ‘Well, I’ve lost my sight, young man. Be thankful you can still see.’

  A rare euphoria bubbled up beneath Steve’s cheeks, and, in what seemed like the most alien motion, he felt them rise. He was suddenly shocked by the sensation of actually smiling. The man offered his hand, Steve took it and felt weightless and superb as he was pulled from the pavement. Looking down, he noticed that the man’s dreadful trainers had become spattered with his vomit. He laughed, not maliciously, but as a result of a brief sensation of hilarious despair. The man, too, smiled. The kind of smile you might construct in a world without mirrors or reflection. Toothy and lopsided.

  ‘There we are, son, it’ll be all right.’

  But the blind man was already alone. Steve was jogging towards a cashpoint, smile intact, ready for the finale.

  But, oh, my friend, that was half an hour ago. Thirty minutes in the past. This is now. Ha. Now.

  Having drawn out as much money as he possibly can, Steve goes shopping. Going from shop to shop purchasing whatever takes his fancy. He’s walking down Market Street with six or seven bags of clothes in each hand. He’s taken his flowery shirt off. He’s topless. He passes Primark; its entrance gurgles customers. He walks under the glass overpass that houses the Arndale Food Court. Children stare down, burgers in their mouths, fries for fingers, laughing at the half-naked Steve. He flexes his large chest. His arms tensed by the weight of the shopping.

  At the corner of Cross Street he’s stopped by a hen party: about fifteen women with yellow hair, orange skin and matching white T-shirts. Each T-shirt has been personalised with a slogan across the chest in black lettering: ‘Blow Job Kat
e’, ‘Cock Muncher’, ‘Becky Big Box’, ‘Penny Piss Flaps’, ‘Super Slut’. All the women are laughing. All of them are drunk and having a brilliant time.

  ‘Super Slut’ is the first to spot Steve’s naked torso. She charges at him and clamps her lips around his nipples, sucking them amid a masterpiece of shrieks and yells. Within seconds, all the girls have gathered round and are stroking at Steve’s toned chest and groping at his denim cock.

  ‘Take a photo! Take a photo!’ yells Super Slut, bending down in front of Steve, simulating doggy. Anal. Penny Piss Flaps follows Super Slut’s command and produces a camera. She edges back to fit Steve and the girls into shot. Through the lens of the camera, Steve can be seen. Centred. Flexing with all his might, the muscles in his face pulling a rock-hard grin. Around him, the girls strike a variety of poses. Two of them lift up their T-shirts to reveal their tits, then push them together to make an awkward tit-bra. Others simply cup their breasts. Cock Muncher crouches by Steve’s groin with her mouth wide open. Fingers in her mouth. Munching at pretend cock.

  The camera flashes and all the girls instantly lose interest. Only Super Slut pauses and shares a lingering kiss with Steve. She’s struck by the tension in his lips and cheeks. It’s like kissing human bones, wrapped in frozen ligament.

  ‘Well . . . thanks for that, mate . . . bye bye . . . haha . . .’

  Steve reassembles his bags, his smile still stretched like a tendon across his face. He looks down at his perfect pink nipples, perched and shiny upon tensed pecs. He feels like his entire body is growing by the second, with every moment of tension and smiling he feels larger and larger. Will I even fit through the door at home? he wonders. Carly? Will I even be able to get to her?

  The two-legged creatures in the streets are of little concern to Steve now. He allows them to stare at his naked chest, permits them to laugh. He meets them with eyes of the finest silk; tensed skin of the most modern plastic. Because we jittery little time-titterers should never have laid Tarmac or dug foundation. We should never have scraped the sky like dense bastards. And now, perhaps, our grand way of life is being replaced by something else. By nothing perhaps. Nothing but a bawdy, pitter-pat, pulsy nonsense and a pinchy and pathetic selection of breathing strategies.