Bug was in an old biscuit warehouse off Camden Lock above a kebab shop and bookies. The windows on the first floor had been covered in corrugated metal, probably by the council, and the front door had been booted in. As soon as we were climbing up the dusty steps the smell of fungus and what seemed like dead meat was overwhelming, mixed with something sweet, like sugar or vomit. The other thing that overwhelmed the senses were the sounds, many, of radios, footsteps, hammers banging, people shouting. It was hard going carrying the TV and Dot helped me. All along the stairwell walls there were flyers for other exhibitions, Die Yuppie Scum and something called Sale.
We reached the top stairs and the place expanded exponentially before me. Dozens of young artists marching past with hammers, boards; no one paid us the slightest attention.
A woman with dreadlocks and Doc Martens walked past carrying a mannequin with a dildo for a nose.
— Hi, is Pierce here? Dot asked.
The woman shook her head and looked me up and down. I was obviously not cool enough. Dot showed me the way to her space. The whole place had been partitioned off into large cubicle-type areas. Again, no one seemed to pay her any heed. I’d expected a Pierce or a Hirst to come up to her and greet her excitedly.
We passed some photos of foetuses in formaldehyde, derivative of Hirst but lacking the humour. An older woman had made a sculptural bust of her bust out of something that looked like dog food. There were tins of the stuff next to it on the floor by the plinth and a sign that said ‘Sponsored by Kennomeat’. I passed some graffiti sprayed on the wall that read: A PILLAR OF LOTTERY TICKETS THREE THOUSAND FEET HIGH. And another that read: 365 EMPTY PICTURE FRAMES PLACED RANDOMLY ROUND THE UK.
We followed the hammering and passed a young man who was making pictures entirely out of the red dots that galleries stick on artworks to show they have been sold.
I struggled on as Dot again asked another artist, a terrifying-looking bare-chested bloke with tattoos, where Pierce was. Fuck Pierce, the guy said then sprinted off. There was a weary workaholic sense of commerce, career and competition about them all. The artists seemed to resent contact with each other. Many had draped material over the openings of their enclosure and all they seemed to do was bitch about the others. And this was a ‘movement’. How could this disparate bunch of aggressive individualists ever amount to a collective anything? A far cry indeed from the surrealists and the Dadaists and all the other ists that Saul worshipped. I considered trying again to get an article published in the Guardian. I had recently got the editor’s address.
We turned the corner of a stack of MDF boards and a funky young blond skinheaded guy turned to Dot and smiled. Finally I set down the TV. It was hard to hear what they were saying as someone was experimenting with a stereo, the banging and sawing was so extreme and people were shouting everywhere, but among lots of name-dropping about Tracey and Damien I got the gist. The guy led Dot to her space and so I had to pick up the TV again.
The guy turned to me. — You’re a writer then, yeah?
I shrugged.
— You want to see my work? His studio space was right next to Dot’s. Dot encouraged me to give the guy a minute.
I smelled it before I saw it. His work appeared to be shit on lollypop sticks.
— Yer s’pose to suck ’em, he said. — Or stick ’em back up yer arse like a cock.
— Really? I said.
— Capitalism’s shit, he said, — that’s what it’s about.
It is never a good idea, as Saul once said, to take a metaphor literally. He handed me his CV and some photos and I smiled to myself as I thought he could rename the work ‘poopsickles’. He shook my hand vigorously and again asked me what paper I worked for. I made my excuses and headed back towards Dot, reflecting on how depravity seemed to be ‘in’. Extraordinary how many of the poor buggers had abandoned conventional artist’s materials to work in shit, piss and blood. I saw tabloids printing pictures of some very average, scared art students trying and failing to be spectacularly offensive, checking the exact consistency of their poo, as if they were da Vinci testing colours of oil paint. It was all perhaps some terribly sincere attempt to prove that their art came from deep within their unique selves, which, since more than five of them were doing pretty much the same thing, seemed not so unique.
I much preferred Dot’s videos. They moved in a subtle way, with qualities utterly absent in her peers. With their intimacy.
I pulled the drape back and there she was. There was an old video player and mess of wires on the floor. She had just joined up my extension cable to another that seemed joined to yet another and was about to plug the TV into it.
— Well, here goes, she said.
Thankfully the TV came to life, but with no image, just fuzz. She stared at it.
— I don’t really fit in, do I? she said. — They’re all so much smarter than me.
— Not at all, I said, — your stuff’s going to be great. I plugged in her video player and got one of her tapes from her rucksack and stuck it in, turned it on. The cross-dressing one. — See, I said, great.
But I did worry for her. There was no way she could compete with these wannabe scandalmongers. I tried to encourage her. We sat and stared at the cross-dressing. It wasn’t working for her, minutes passed and she was silent, sitting there on the dusty floor, fiddling with the cables. I put on the moustache tape.
— You think I should show just one tape? On different tellys? Or lots?
I shrugged. — Sorry, maybe . . . Uhm . . .
— Or get a big screen and a video projector, they’re expensive. Or make a kind of stack of TVs?
I apologised again for my ignorance and her eyes became fixed on the white walls. Behind it and beyond, the sounds of a hundred hammers, drills, feet, purposeful activity. I looked round at the plug sockets, the old TVs. Her breathing quickened, she started hyperventilating.
— Saul would know what to do, she said.
An overwhelming sense of failure came over us both.
— Oh God, oh God, I’m so fucking useless.
I held her, she kissed my neck, bit my ear, whispered in a hiss, — Fuck me!
We were animal, clawing at each other. I fell to my knees and tore her shirt from her. She wrapped her leg around my head as I feasted on her moistening cunt muttering insanities. – My darling, my Duchess! I could feel her looking round, gripping my head, whispering.
— Quick, what if someone sees, we must be quick. I can hear someone coming. There was no one, it was just her little game. I put first one then another finger deep inside her and her pelvis bucked, her spine arched, my teeth tore into her thigh, as my little finger circled her anus. I felt her cunt spasm around my fingers and suddenly a hot gush sprayed my face. Her body writhing, she started screaming.
— Come in my face, come in me!
I covered her mouth with my hand and she struggled as if violated, as we fell to the ground. Around us the banging did not cease and the ground shook with drills. Her legs spasmed and she kicked the wall. I tore her pants off and was soon inside her, thrusting only for seconds before spraying all over her cunt lips, her skirt and face.
We heard footsteps behind us, from the other side of the partition. I made her lie still. Shh. We both looked and saw clearly that Dot’s foot and panties were visible from the opening.
Don’t move, I whispered.
The footsteps receded and we broke apart.
— Fuck, maybe it was Pierce, she said.
Again it struck me, how the idea of being watched secretly had aroused her.
— Don’t worry, I said, — if anyone saw they’d probably just think it was performance art.
She laughed and held me. I apologised for coming too soon but she didn’t care, she said, we still had time to work on it.
But what if her art was like my cock, failed and premature. In my mind some absurd equivalence was forming. If I could hold back my ejaculations then her success as an artist would be assured. My fear w
as that we were just fucking around and wasting time and would be left with nothing.
That night when we got back Saul was already comatose in his bed, with three boxes of sherry denuded. Dot wanted to wake him to ask his advice but I calmed her.
— Shh, he hates being woken. Here, help me take his boots off.
I noticed that a job application lay on the floor, spilled sherry blurring the words he had written. Dot got her video camera; she wanted to film Saul’s sleeping face. She plugged it into the back of the telly and his face filled the screen. We sat there silent then on the edge of his bed as he snored, staring not at him, but at his TV face. We managed to get a glass out of the last sherry box and I smoked. Dot lay down next to Saul and I curled up with my head resting on her lap.
— What are we to do? I heard her whisper.
I must have dozed off as I was woken by movement. She was stroking me, kissing me, whispering shh. It took me a while to work out where I was. The ceiling, the posters, the sense of him just beside me, the stench of his alcohol sweat. Then his face still there on the TV screen. Dot’s face over me, grinning like a demon.
— Shh, she whispered, her hand covering my mouth as the other reached for my cock. I could not, I would not.
— Shh, stop struggling or he’ll hear us.
That was when it happened. At first there were just gentle kisses as we watched the screen, but then things quickly got out of control. Her hand was at my belt again, and her mouth round my stiffening cock.
— My God, no, no, you’ll wake him up!
Her mouth full, she could not speak, she motioned to the TV. She was staring at it too, at Saul’s face on TV, as if we were to watch it, not him, for emergency signs of his waking. That he was on TV seemed to give us licence to ignore the fact that he was sleeping inches from us on the bed. Playfully the demon pinned down my arms with her knees and thrust her naked sex in my face.
Her mouth already fast at my cock, the smell of her sex, her pubes teasing my lips. I saw Saul’s face twitch on the TV and froze.
I prayed for it to be over soon. I could hear him moving in the bed just inches from us. She took me deep into her mouth and was making herself gag on my cock, her teeth riding rugged over my swollen head. From beyond the line of buttocks, where the panties bit tight into her thigh I caught the glimpse of light in her eye from the TV. She was watching the TV. She shuddered suddenly wetting my face with her cum. Her pelvis bucking in spasms and I was thrown into a frenzy sucking the juice from her soaking, twitching cunt.
She got up then, whispered shh, and went back to her bedroom, smiling to herself and I was left to face the sleeping Saul, my face reeking of her. He mumbled something and I froze.
He mumbled again.
— Turn . . . off . . . the light – that was all. I lay there staring at the TV screen. My face and Saul’s were together on its surface.
I feared the morning when Saul would work out what had happened.
I must have dozed off because I awoke beside him. He was not abrupt, as I expected. He simply spent the usual reverent time to find a butt end big enough to relight and stared out at his scattered records and clothes as he smoked.
— It’s fucking obscene, he said. — Unbelievable.
He stared perplexed at the TV screen with the image of his own feet on it, then, disgruntled, unplugged the camera and stuck on the news.
— Look, I’m really really sorry . . .
He ignored me, kept on.
— These humiliations . . .
I searched for words and he did too as ITN told us that the World Trade Center bomber had just been arrested and another shopping mall the size of a town had just opened and we were bombing in Bosnia, and Damien Hirst had sold his ninth formaldehyde animal for six figures.
— For a man of my years, to have to endure –
— It won’t happen again, I said, — We were drunk it was just –
— What are you on about? I’m talking about job interviews. Have you ever been to one? They want me to go to a call centre. I don’t even know what a call centre is! I’m going to have to have your help.
That was all he said.
He would not talk of our bedtime behaviours. For many nights similar drunken rituals were performed, but in every episode Saul was the same, eyes closed as if pretending it was a dream. And each day was the denial of the daylight waking reality, as if we were vampires that only lived at night. In the three weeks that followed we three always slept together in many combinations in as many beds and we entered what I came to think of as the ‘perverse equilibrium’. Every day I faced the questions and every day it was the denial but come night, when drunken, our bodies found each other.
One morning after another night I decided it was time to confront her.
— Can’t you see how sick this is? It’s time we sat down with Saul and discussed it all. She laughed in my face.
— My little brother, she said as she kissed me.
I needed to analyse it with him but I knew he would shh me as he did before. Don’t be crass. But how could I not talk about it when every night the ritual became more perverse?
There was one night I recall vividly. (Although, perhaps even this memory has been tainted by Saul’s squalid texts.) It was in Saul’s bedroom again. The curtains were drawn open and moonlight and street light illuminated his rubbish, his clothes in piles, his jackets hanging on nails like a firing squad, an audience.
Dot and I lay on either side of him as he pretended to sleep.
His vast wardrobe doors lay wide open, but nothing was visible inside. It seemed a huge black hole in the room, a portal to another time and place, staring back like an empty eye socket. His books were face down on the ground, food cartons discarded, the interior silver sachet from a sherry box inflated like a party balloon. Every object was illuminated in the same moon-blue light, unified in its mess, somehow an equality between each as if it was carved in stone. And on the TV screen Saul’s cock, standing erect, filling the screen. We stared at it, as if it were a pillar or cenotaph. Then she started to suck it.
And the hand that gripped mine as she climbed on top of me, as she sucked him and took my cock and slid me into her wetness, as my hand went to her mouth to stifle her cries – that hand, as I felt her cunt tighten round me as I withdrew and shot over her ass-hole. I am sure of it, the hand that held mine so firmly, gripping so tight, was not hers.
— Morning, he said. Fucking hell, no ibuprofen or Rennies, I’m sick as a dog, couldn’t sub me a quid for some cancer sticks, could you? as he passed me on his way to the bathroom for his usual post-booze vomit.
Such banalities. Such necessary lies to keep the un-utterable truth alive for another day. Such beauty that we pretended all was no more than drunken late-night fumblings, forgotten in the hung-over search for food and pills.
The opening night of Bug was in two weeks and I was to present my fake attempt to duplicate Saul’s Duchess rant, which itself was based on something fake, to Pierce. I had been unable to complete it for these reasons. Dot had returned late and drunk from another day at the warehouse. She was wearing a kid’s sweetie necklace and the terrifying wig in two tiny tufty ponytails with a seventies psychedelic miniskirt and sparkly silver disco socks that she’d cut the toes from and so magically transformed into armbands. She wanted to make another artwork right away. If she could just slow down, I told her, decide on one tape, then her exhibition would be done.
— We haven’t done the best yet, she kept saying. — We have to keep going.
She had an idea that sounded familiar to me, again from the Duchess book: Duchamp tied to the chair. Something about sacrifice, paying the price for being bad. I didn’t want to burst her bubble or to let Saul know that I’d worked out that his heroes were phoney, so I agreed to go ahead with the new artwork. The vodka she brought helped.
I drank and watched as she arranged the camera and tripod, marvelling at her manic energy. It was OK, I told myself, just one mor
e game, but I worried for Saul. His hand was shaking as he poured the vodka and his forehead was sweating. It was late in the day but still he was still only half dressed. Pinstripe flares, barefoot, bare chest with kimono.
She set a chair in the middle of his room, throwing clothes and ashtrays to the side to make space and pointed her camera at the seat. I helped arrange the anglepoise lamp before the chair as she collected Saul’s ties and belts to use as restraints, along with a glass and a high-heel shoe which would be ‘props’.
She had not decided which one would be tied to the chair and did not meet my eyes as she went through the procedure. My heart was aching for a little glance to tell me it was all a joke, but there was nothing. We were to draw straws but had none, so it was cigarette butts. Her fingers did not hide the fags well enough, we could all see which was the shortest, but I sensed it was a secret message from her – a sacrifice had to be made to validate our sacrilegious union. I waited till last and took the shortest.
More vodka was required and Saul volunteered to go to the off-licence with her money. I tried to ask him if he was OK with all this, but he left with no more than a shrug of shoulders. We were alone together.
— He seems to be a bit weirded out by . . . you know . . . our um . . . sleeping arrangements. He seems . . .
— I know, she said, — don’t worry.
She told me I should be brave, this was going to be the answer to everything. She kissed my cheek. — Trust me, she said and I tried. I gave her my hands which she tied behind my back round the chair. — A lovely little game, she said.
Ménage Page 21