Friction

by Joe Stretch

  Downstairs, through the door and down the street, Justin turns the steering wheel of his Peugeot. Justin, finally. He pulls up outside Colin’s house and gets out of his car. He skips neatly around the bonnet and strides heroically to the front door, which he kicks down. He lets out a small blurt of laughter as the door swings open ahead of him. It was only on the latch. His leg bones jolted as the door opened with unexpected ease. He sniggers again, feeling embarrassed; a slight shame.

  ‘Colin!’ he shouts, stepping into the hall and looking up the steep stairs which begin almost as soon as you enter the house. ‘Colin!’ he shouts again, forcing anger into his voice. He feels strangely guilty about breaking down the door and trespassing. He steps to his right and glances into the living room; a foul brown three-piece on a thin brown carpet. On the far side of the room on the mantelpiece, Justin recognises the bright blue of a used and positive pregnancy test. He chuckles at the sight of it, covering his mouth with a sideways palm. Who keeps piss-stained paper on their mantelpiece? ‘Colin!’ he screams, turning again to the staircase, his voice containing a slight smirk.

  Sensing that the element of surprise is already lost on account of the giggling and the shouting, Justin runs up the stairs. He reaches the top, where again his confidence fails and a smile appears on his lips, keen to graduate to a laugh.

  He’s never been to Colin’s house. It’s disgusting. He thinks back to the Malmaison, to the jam-jarred foetus and the woman’s scar: one of civilisation’s smaller stories. What am I? he thinks. A twat, presumably. Another smaller story. The experiment wasn’t meant to include episodes like this. Where are the cheering Africans? The liberated call-centre staff? The keys to the city? I’ve made no one happy, Justin confirms, wiping yet another smile off his face.

  It’s nerves, naturally. He’s only nervous. I’m not a hero, he thinks, I’m to blame. He recalls meeting Rebecca in the Nude Factory. There must have been a simpler way. We could have holidayed together. She could have chained me to the bed. We might have laughed. Been happy.

  He composes himself and reaches for the fake porcelain doorknob on the bathroom door. He turns it and the latch gives with a click. He steps cautiously into the bathroom. More embarrassment: Colin’s shit himself and it absolutely stinks. But then, Jesus, the blood. Justin watches as Colin squirms on top of Rebecca; his throat gurgling like a plughole.

  Justin catches his reflection in the mirror above the sink. Staring into his own eyes, he identifies something he believes to be himself. A glint. A memory pool. But this self exists only in his eyes. He doesn’t recognise his body at all; neither the head that surrounds his eyes nor the torso on which his head is perched. He feels he couldn’t possibly manoeuvre his shoulders or his arms; he feels completely paralysed. He’s distracted by a long and sudden burp from Colin. Justin’s gaze lowers: all this bloodshed, all of it just for sex.

  Colin crawls to Justin’s feet. His head lifts up with a disturbing jolt, as if only flaps of skin are keeping it on his shoulders. He tries to speak but succeeds only in spewing a green gloop at Justin’s feet.

  Justin is motionless. He’s waiting patiently for anger and shock to make him move. Where is my rage? he thinks. He aids the process by staring at the blood, the unnatural curves of Rebecca’s body. The coffees sit unsipped on the side of the bath. He wants to laugh out loud.

  ‘Well, it’s gone too far,’ says Justin, immediately shocked by the uselessness of his words, as if they hadn’t come from his brain but had been lodged between his teeth and had suddenly come loose and fallen from his mouth.

  ‘Help,’ barks Colin, his gob a gaping blue, the entrance to a cold computer game hell. Justin notices Rebecca’s eyelids flicker, forcing a sundried tomato to fall on to the floor. But he can’t look at her. This is cowardice, he thinks, his life fucked up all over his face and shaven crown. He sits on the bath and picks up a magazine.

  ‘I could do with some advice, you know, guys? I could do with writing off for some wisdom, you know? Guys?’ says Justin, flicking through magazines as the guys die beneath him. He executes an enormous yawn, so big it almost sends him tumbling back into the bathtub. After completing the yawn with a rather camp cooing sound, he nonchalantly takes Colin by the hair and carefully brings his face smashing into a radiator. There, he thinks, a bit of anger, at last. There is a dull flesh-on-metal thud. A tingling sound reverberates around the acoustics of the radiator. Then pushing Colin’s body to one side, Justin kneels over Rebecca and kindly removes the remaining tomato from her eye.

  ‘Rebecca, wake up.’

  ‘Justin?’

  ‘Yeah, it’s me.’

  Justin stares at Rebecca’s stomach. My child? he thinks. I’m some sort of dad. There are tears in his eyes but they were put there by his yawn. He takes Rebecca by the shoulders and turns her on to her side. She splutters approval.

  Nature, thinks Justin, it gets you in the end. We thrash about like plastic fantastics, talking of romance and success. But nature gets you in the end. It arrives late at the house party with its two able wingmen, death and birth. Before you can strike a pose they have taken over. Death is on the decks, spinning records like a pro. Birth is on the dance floor, showing up our sorry moves. Nature is in the corner, chatting up your love, winning them completely. Justin can’t think what to do. Nature has won. Against all odds. He looks at Rebecca. He wants to nurse her wounds with a warm sponge. Is this my fate?

  He can’t stop yawning. He has to turn away from Rebecca to unleash one of the windiest yawns he’s ever done in the direction of Colin, whose nose is scattered all over his face like bird seed. Tired of pretending to be dead, Rebecca returns to the same spluttering sort of life she’d been leading an hour or so ago. She fires up her traction engine lungs in an attempt to prevent Justin from nodding off.

  ‘Justin . . . Come on.’

  Justin shakes his head vigorously from side to side then stretches his eyes open. He expels a large lungful of air and with it the same cooing sound we heard a few moments ago.

  ‘I’m sorry, Rebecca. It’s me, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ says Rebecca, her words brittle. ‘You’re the idiot.’

  Justin nods. Rebecca puts a hand on his knee. He can’t feel any squeezing although her hand is clearly straining. He looks again at her uneven stomach. She never aborted my child, he recalls. It was all complete bullshit.

  ‘It’s funny, isn’t it?’ says Justin.

  ‘What is?’

  ‘The way things work out.’

  ‘It’s hilarious,’ says Rebecca. ‘Were you going to call an ambulance or . . . or would you like me to do it?’

  Rebecca’s voice sounds barely human. That is to say, too human. She’s in danger of dying of anger. What is Justin doing? With every wave of rage she’s sure that the blood accelerates from her cuts and that her bruises darken.

  ‘Save me,’ she croaks.

  ‘I am saving you.’

  ‘This is real life!’

  Rebecca splutters and recoils deep into her consciousness, once again taking up residence in her kneecap or her elbow joint. Somewhere small. She barely notices as Justin lifts her head into his lap and begins to tuck the loose strands of her hair behind her ears.

  Justin’s thoughts are wordless as he massages her scalp. He drifts through his past. Its principle characters turn on him then freeze. Noises leap from mouths but desist just short of making sense. Episodes merge. His mother sits at the table in the restaurant, strippers faking it beyond her shoulder, celebrities falling to bits. He sighs. All of it just for sex.

  It’s minutes later when Rebecca feels her head being gently lowered to the floor and hears Justin dialling nine three times into his mobile phone. Her eyes open in time to see him place his hand over the receiver and stare at her with a beaten gaze.

  ‘I don’t want a girlfriend, Rebecca,’ he says, his lips exaggerating the shapes of the words. He grins. ‘And I do realise this is real life. Yes . . . this is real life.’
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br />   Epilogue

  YOU NEED TO know my name. That’s what they’ve told me. And, like all prisoners, I have a grudging grasp of obedience. It seems that however much time passes, our species still gets wet at the prospect of revelation and truth. So yes, they’ve told me to write about myself. Me. Really me. I smirked at the idea. But Governor Gordon has had it with my story. Susan, too. It’s a screw-up. Truly. It’s a screw-up. And existence, it seems, boils down to little more than a selection of pronouns: my story wasn’t for you or about them. It was about me. How disappointing.

  I am called Theo. A stupid name, I’m sure you’ll agree. To me it sounds like a process. A verb. To Theo. A word to describe a quick and hysterical slip into total despair. When I was younger, they used to take me out of here on day trips. I used to go to schools to see how I behaved around children my own age. I didn’t do well. They suffered, the little girls and boys. Don’t, Theo. Don’t.

  Other than that I’ve been here all my life. Writing silly made-up stories for Susan and for Gordon. Finally, I discovered the truth thanks to the Evernet database. I served it to them sour, in chapters. Now the two of them are trapped and angry. They’ve requested I tell you about myself. Relax. I have very little to say.

  The date. I know how society feels about dates – you’re obsessed. I almost certainly can’t share your enthusiasm for years or specific days. I’ve spent so much of my life in a kind of dateless sea. I’ve been aware of some form of duration but never really found myself in the wash of time itself. Only in recent years have I begun to understand the full significance of dates. Jesus, 1945: that’s a big ’un, I’ve gathered that. 1789: woo hoo. 2001: it must have been extremely exciting.

  It’s not the same for me. Time, I mean. I recall having been alive in the past; certain lights and the odd feeling. But realistically, I remember bugger all. Just the odd sensation that I touchingly allow to masquerade as memory. Agewise, I reckon I’m twenty-odd. Yeh. I’m a jolly young twenty-something looking forward to the future.

  I need to tell you more about my research on Evernet. To those who watch my text this will seem superfluous, no doubt. But to me it matters; the research counts. You see, my most recent story isn’t the same as the other grotesques I’ve submitted previously. Though no doubt Susan and Gordon see it as consistent with my earlier writing. I maintain that it is a history; a real life, of sorts.

  Around six months ago (forgive me, I’m hopeless at estimating passing time) I began researching my personal background on the Evernet system. What I was looking for was some evidence of me having been born. I had learned very late about the concept of reproduction and human evolution – it came as quite a shock. Throughout my life I’ve been continually bewildered by my own existence. I’ve always felt originless, as if my body had burst suddenly out of nothing. The notion of civilisation was kept from me. For many years I assumed existence to be little more than a selection of toings and froings, carried out in brightly lit rooms.

  Slowly, through an untrustworthy mixture of rumour and fact, the full extent of mankind’s project became known to me. In theory, none of us ‘real lifers’ were expected to know the principles of reproduction, for our own safety. But these things have a way of becoming known, even in a place like this. In fact, this is an important point: the present Authority really is a bumbling misery of posturing. Little more. It’s wonderfully inefficient. Many people see the Authority as extremely repressive – but I must confess, I’ve never found it so. I remember meeting a drunken warden on a late night trip to the lavatory. I must have been pretty young. He described, in slurred English, a distressing sexual disease he’d contracted from his mistress; the poor man was beside himself. It was through such encounters that I began to understand more about gender and reproduction. I now know that on the outside world infidelity is an imprisonable offence. Alcoholism, too. I’ve learnt a little about power and repression as well, thanks to my research. I know they’re both practical jokes; both always the same.

  There was no record of my birth on Evernet. I was able to learn that I didn’t possess any form of citizenship. I wasn’t melancholy, I had no idea what it was. But I had an increasingly heated belief in my own innocence. I realise now that this is a very old-fashioned conviction. But it was strong, nonetheless. My slow life had culminated in a quaint desire to know where I’d come from. The guilt that I’d lived with so comfortably for so long had suddenly become alien.

  Eventually (a silly word to describe hours spent trawling Evernet) I located my prison file. It wasn’t especially difficult to find; the computer wasn’t intended for patients and, as I say, this so-called ‘repressive’ Authority has always struck me as rather casual. I shan’t forget that moment, suddenly seeing my name on the screen. Theo: the embarrassed squirm at seeing it in print.

  I learnt that my mother’s name was Rebecca and that my father’s name was Justin. I instantly liked the names, probably just because of my own self-loathing. They struck me as clean, healthy names.

  I had hoped for a sudden pang in what Susan calls my ‘soul’ when I discovered my parents’ names. But what I felt was a sudden cramping in my bowels. Besides the names of my parents, I learnt a little more about my beginnings. I was born in the city of Manchester and was placed, almost immediately, in an institution. My mother, Rebecca, appears to have died in childbirth. It was this last piece of information that dropped a pinch of what I know to be sadness into my brain. Of course, I didn’t miss her or even have an enormous desire to have known her, but it felt a little awkward that she’d died giving birth to me. I admit to feeling guilty and a little embarrassed that, in death, she had spawned such uselessness.

  My file contained written accounts of my behaviour on the various trial excursions I’d been taken on as a child. I didn’t recognise the events they described; I have no memory of the excursions to the outside world. The reports made terribly severe accusations of my state of mind. They cast me as a troublemaker, spoke of nascent sexual urges that could only cause trouble. This struck me as laughable. Sure, I caused some stirs in my youth after a snort or two of dog dirt, but that powder made fools of us all. I didn’t even know what a sexual urge was. But they’re idiots, this Authority. I know that now. The system stinks.

  I learnt that I’d been placed on ‘Creative Therapy’ when I was seven years old and that I’ve been writing stories for fifteen years in total. The comments on my stories were unrelentingly damning. Even at an early age I’d apparently produced ‘unstable’ stories, crammed with enough immorality and baseless violence to make my release unsanctionable. The comments you made hurt me, Susan. I’d always hoped you might have understood. I enjoyed the writing, did it with honesty and conviction. I hope that you experience some regret.

  The most significant part of my file was right at the bottom, in a section titled ‘Risk Assessment’. There I found just four words: ‘Original Deviancy. (High Risk)’. It was these words, the allusive significance of them, that really stoked the fire in my belly. I remember walking back to my cell with the four of them rattling round my skull. I couldn’t sleep. I just lay awake trying to fit things together: Original Deviancy, my mother Rebecca, the scraps of knowledge I possessed about sex and the Authority.

  Those were muddled times. I confess that it was then that I grew weak: I surrendered to the dark shuffle. Oh, it hurts to admit it, especially to you, Susan. But yes, it was the only solution to my sleeping problems. I would masturbate over and over again till I was exhausted and couldn’t think but just sleep, finally.

  With every session on Evernet, I felt different; more complicated and prone to daydreams. I devoured the world I found on Evernet. I read the magazines, viewed the TV programmes, the websites, the recipe books, the films, I became a right little shit. Serious. I was well fucked-up. No doubt.

  Truth is. I’m all right.

  But I knew what a woman was, finally. I knew what you were, Susan, at last. Because I found nudes on Evernet. I couldn’t believe my luc
k. The nude sites were usually medical in origin; the only places you could legally display the female body in all its glory. I bit into those bodies with my brain. I tore off their limbs with my teeth and put fists down their throats. Those sterile specimens were quite enough for me. Enough to send my imagination trembling into the shadows. When I happened upon a turn-of-the-century pornography site, I couldn’t believe my luck. It was, I think, the last of its kind. The last remnant of the civilisation of porn. I was overjoyed. With a computer’s assistance, I became sexual, or rather, horny.

  I found the concept of ‘Original Deviancy’ easy to trace. It referred to a sort of commotion that surrounded my birth, as well as to the widespread use of a sex machine, about which I was able to discover more. The White Love 1000. My first response was one of amusement; the notion of a sex machine was completely at odds with my basic grasp of reproduction and sex. I couldn’t begin to imagine the purpose behind such a contraption. In my isolation, I felt far superior to a machine. My late-night flights of fancy took me to some grave situations. I’m sorry to say I’ve contorted you on more than one occasion, Susan. I have placed you in situations that would make you shriek. I have shut my eyes and conducted my experiments upon your flesh.

  As my research continued, I was able to piece together a fairly clear picture of the context into which I was born. I learnt about ‘unseen lives’, ‘recreational abortion’, the old Internet site ‘newsex.biz’. These were revelations to me. I got a strong impression of civilisation as a stuttering little creature. A kind of disorientated dwarf, chasing itself without exhaustion. A little runt, collecting things then misplacing them altogether. This was a surprise. Whatever I had imagined took place in the outside world was clearly wide of the mark. I had always seen society as a tremendously ordered and transparent affair – I was shocked to the core by its grim secrets, its neediness.