Friction

by Joe Stretch

  I am Steve and I must not succumb. I must have justice. Anal. Oh God, this is fast. NOW THAT WE’VE FOUND LOVE WHAT ARE WE GONNA DO, WITH IT? The music ploughs into the nineties and Carly’s jumper is yanked off her arms and around her neck. But her head’s in the way. Steve’s on his knees, stripping the jeans from her legs, skinning her alive. He reaches up and wrenches her jumper away, so hard he half expects to take her head off with it, leaving her decapitated but still warm and beautiful. Oh fuck, the clothes, the fucking clothes. Short bouts of desperate undressing cut with increasingly unconvincing moments of mighty, muscular foreplay. Her jeans are off, her jumper too, one massive pull at her bra and the rear connection snaps and her breasts are blinking, startled. WHAT ARE WE GONNA DO, WITH IT?

  Carly is adept and marvellous. She hisses, sparks. She’s being electrocuted, noises of agony, high-end sonics, entirely staged inflections of lust and enjoyment. Loud guttural groans: where nature and culture meet. She permits her stripping, high-kicks her way out of her knickers, makes herself weightless as Steve drags her crotch towards his. Oh, the anger, the dull, predictable anger of all this, she thinks, perhaps, as she throws her head to one side and squeezes her eyes shut.

  By this time, Steve is embarking on several projects of damage limitation. He’s thrown his vest off completely, but has left his trousers at his knees. Removing them completely would involve standing up and the loss of mood and momentum. His will is faltering. Maybe anal wasn’t such a good idea – fine in theory but, logistically, it now seems rather daunting. His cock, meanwhile, is reassuringly hard, showcasing its impressive width and striking length.

  ‘Come on!’ says Steve, to no apparent end.

  The thoughts, the bodies and the emotions struggle to maintain this act of redemptive sex. Struggle to create the aesthetics of power and forgiveness. Carly is surprised by Steve’s aggression, genuinely rather impressed by it. She thinks of Versus. How she lay between the A-frames of the Relentless Bliss, the handheld operating device, the clit fizzer, the ambient music, the internal vibrating mechanism. She looks down her body to her midriff, watches Steve sculpt her legs high into the air. He is a builder, an artist, the architect of this sky-scraping sexual imagery. Come on then, she thinks, as his cock rises and hovers above the vista of her stomach, the distant valley of her body. Wait a moment.

  ‘Steve, get a johnny!’ Carly blurts out suddenly. Yes, get a johnny. You’re not a sex machine, so there’s still that old-fashioned thing. What’s it called? Pregnancy . . . civi . . . yes, civilisation! ‘Please, just go and get a johnny,’ Carly says again.

  Steve grunts, then his face becomes softer, as if heated up by six or seven degrees. ‘We don’t need one,’ he says, running a finger between Carly’s buttocks and instantly regretting having done so. ‘We don’t, I want to try the other . . . way . . .’

  ‘Oh,’ says Carly, instinctively clenching her butt cheeks and capturing Steve’s subtle little finger in their grip. ‘You should have said. Anal? I would have bought the right gels.’

  The right gels, thinks Steve, that’s right. Life is shit unless you own the appropriate lubricants.

  A second happens, then the loud sound of a woman singing. I AM GOING TO LOVE YOU FOREVER. Steve stands and his trousers fall and complete the remainder of their journey to his feet, past his sharp shins. That is that. Carly’s feet swoop down from the ceiling, she pulls them up on to the sofa, reaching for her woollen pullover. A ballad is playing and the moment is lost.

  ‘We don’t usually do it like that.’

  ‘I wanted to try something different.’

  ‘But it hurts, Stevie.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  Most women take the contraceptive pill. Don’t worry, mate, I’m on the pill, women sometimes say, before shagging a stranger. Carly, however, is extremely paranoid. Never grants sexual asylum to Steve’s cock unless it’s accompanied by latex and spermicide: the diplomats of progress and civilisation. She demands a condom, a johnny, when having conventional intercourse. Anal is a grey area.

  ‘I don’t want to, Stevie, not tonight. Why don’t we have a bath?’

  ‘I don’t want a bath, Carly, I’m already clean.’

  ‘Then let’s do it normal. Get a johnny, then do it normal. Tomorrow night maybe we could do it the other way. I could get the right gel from Versus.’

  It’s over now, that is that. Steve’s standing above Carly, trousers around his ankles, erection falling like the setting sun. Where the fuck does this leave us? he wonders, leaving the room to get away from the girl. And how the fuck did I forget to put a johnny in my back pocket? I should have done just in case. If she said no to anal I could have gone straight in with the alternative. Doggy. It was careless, a badly thought-out plan. Fuck-ups like this cost lives in certain situations. Armies don’t forget bullets or helmets, that’s why they win wars and succeed in shooting people dead. Fuck. He could always get a condom and go back to the living room. Yeh, I could always go back, he thinks, slip it on, flip her over, fuck her. Fuck it. Too late. I’m losing this war because I forgot the bullets and the helmets, forgot the guns, left them back at the base. Now I’m in some desert surrounded by Arabs with no way to kill any of them.

  ‘Steve?’

  Carly appears at the bedroom door, still wearing only her stringy black knickers. The corpse of her broken bra hangs limp in her right hand. Her brown hair falls over her collar bone towards the gentle incline of her breasts.

  ‘You know how paranoid I am, baby?’

  ‘It’s fine.’

  ‘I want to give you what you want . . . but anal . . .’

  ‘It was just an idea.’

  ‘It’s not about the money?’

  ‘How could it possibly be about the money, Carly?’

  Carly lingers in the doorway, playing with the dead bra with her fingers. Lifting and rising. She does look like a slice of heavenly ham. Her skin is re-formed meat: generic and artificial but delicious nonetheless. Satisfying. On her face, her features are doing a very good impression of sorrow and guilt. Her eyes are bottomless and her jaw is relaxed. It’s even possible that she may feel guilty and sorrowful, but it’s hard to say exactly. She approaches the bed and lies down next to Steve. He’s leaning on the headboard, she rests her head on his chest. They wait a moment.

  ‘You can do what you like with me,’ says Carly, straightening out her body until it looks distinctly medical. ‘Really, do what you want with me, I like that. Just with a johnny.’

  It’s easy to say. This is it, life, England, still and consuming. Show business. The ruthless abandon of individuals and their paper-thin desire to draw breath. People are drying up, are becoming resistant to the visual cultures that nourish them. Their arid innards can no longer play host to the consistencies of this age of imagery. Crimsons, skins and liquids.

  Did you ever sit in silence, alone in a room? A kitchen, perhaps. Did you ever assume you were sitting in complete silence, only to find the opposite to be the case? Only to find that the silence was noisy? A thermostat on a fridge turns itself off: suddenly, a previously inaudible humming stops and you realise it hasn’t been quiet in the room at all. You realise that you’ve been gradually deafened by inaudible buzzing. On such occasions the atmosphere is shocking, dwarfing and uneasy, shot through with shards of revelation. I swear that the years are ticking by and I fucking swear that this is an important metaphor: that the fridge is still buzzing.

  This is what must be done. Steve must say something like: ‘You know, you should go to Versus, you should go and get the appropriate gels.’ Causing Carly to say something like: ‘Yeh, OK, I will go to Versus. I will go and buy the appropriate gels.’ This will result in Carly going to Versus to purchase the gels necessitated by man’s persistent desire to penetrate woman anally. Great stuff. Great shopping. She will come home with a carrier bag on her arm containing the Versus product: a sexual gel called Anomax. Of course, she won’t mention the fact that for the second time in forty-eight
hours, she paid £9.99 for the pleasure of being powerfully penetrated by an Autopen Relentless Bliss. She won’t mention that, so everything’ll be pretty cordial between the two of them. Steve will maintain some of his glowing desire for revenge, but on the whole, they will be friendly and even manage to share prolonged moments of eye contact. Suggesting love, future and sexual camaraderie. During one such session of eye contact and having consumed the majority of a bottle of vodka, there will almost certainly be a tacit understanding that they’re both sufficiently fucked and free. Both capable of sharing daring acts of physical pleasure. Life is simple and brilliant.

  Like all great diplomats, Steve will remove Carly’s knickers with his teeth. He will kiss her calves and lick her thighs as an homage to romance. Then, in one almighty celebration of equality and twenty-first-century freedom, he will locate her clitoris with his tongue and lick it with rhythm and tenderness. In the interests of world peace, he will carefully negotiate the entrance to her vagina with his fingers and spend some quality time using them to simulate the presence of his own cock. Carly, to her credit, will pop her mind and considerately enjoy the feeling of Steve’s fingers inside her. How lovely, she will think. She will groan appropriately and flights of fancy will make her moist, making his fingers wet and odorous. It’s going swimmingly.

  In a gentlemanly gesture, Steve will use the moisture from Carly’s loins as a natural lubricant. He will gently switch his attention to her buttony anus. Gain access to it with damp digits. Carly, touched by Steve’s endeavours, but doubtful of her ability to self-lubricate, will reach over for the Anomax and tap Steve on the head with the tube. A moment of cute humour among the precise infiltration and the orchestrated ecstasy.

  In accordance with all reliable guides to anus-orientated intercourse, Carly will have first one, and then two of Steve’s fingers introduced to her arse. Her liquid grasp of the theatrics and performative norms of contemporary sex habits will cause her to squeak, wince and finally accommodate. Her colon will loosen up and relax, like it’s finding its feet at a house party. Naturally, the polite introduction of Steve’s cock to the occasion will bring an element of pain to both participants. Like an enemy bullet to the thigh, the tip of Steve’s cock will be squeezed and hurt by Carly’s perplexed and disorientated biology. And now, of course, we’re fucking. Attention spans working overtime in an age of ignorance and forgetting. This is intense physical enjoyment, no place for the wandering mind. Bang! Bang! Bang!

  ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘Yeh, yeh. Don’t stop.’

  So, short jabs. Serating sex. A mixture of sandpaper sensation and the memory of kidneys in the windows of butcher’s shops. Foreskin agony. A pain in the arse. Anger. A cock stabbing into an anus, making it shabby and devastated, dealing with shit. Keep trying, keep going. Boyfriend and girlfriend. The twenty-first century is getting going and we’re fucking for ideas. It stings.

  ‘Euggg euggg euggg euggg.’

  This is where we leave. This is where it will end.

  ‘Aueh aueh aueh aueh.’

  ‘Not so hard, Steve.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  Savour it, remember. The bedroom walls, Magnolia. The skirting boards of Duck Egg Blue. The decent hi-fi system. Steve has blond hair. The light is shit and bright and the sex is blunt and raging.

  ‘Ouch!’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  This is bruschetta love. Cock wrapped in fajita. Sex on a bed of caramelised red onion. Football romance. The age of lifestyle and hidden agenda. Steve’s cock is being squeezed to death and Carly’s had better anal in the past. It’s all so incredibly humane.

  This is when we’ll leave. Carly’s head will be hammered down sideways into the mattress, hair turning around her neck and over her bony shoulder, like a road to nowhere in particular. Steve will be pasting more Anomax on to his exiting cock. Holding on to Carly’s smooth, sensitive sides. He will be staring up at the ceiling, eyes flooded with water, tears of pain and no hope. The girl, oh God, the girl and his life, his decisions. Shouldn’t this be hurting less? It fucking kills, bang, bang, bang. He will doubt his ability to ejaculate. I’m never gonna come, bang, bang, bang, I’m never gonna come. It’s like punching a wall and I feel dreadful. And then he’ll be falling backwards, cock skidding out of her arse. Carly floored and moaning as she must, turning over with her eyes shut and her arms groping for comfort. Steve, his body underworked and energetic, craving exhaustion, a chance to sleep, his cock on fire.

  ‘Was that OK, baby? Was I all right?’ Carly will ask.

  ‘Don’t, baby, please,’ will be Steve’s reply.

  ‘Steve? Are you all right?’

  ‘I’m fine, I’m fine.’

  ‘Did you come? Tell me you came, Stevie!’

  Heads ache. This is where we leave. Carly panting and wondering. Steve on his knees, not knowing. Breathing and failing. An end of sorts. We’re leaving, as we must, but they will be there. The bed, the light, the now. The winds in their veins beginning to howl.

  II

  Three Months Later

  15

  THE FACTS FLIT around me like flies, sometimes landing and allowing me to creep at them with a flat palm. And though I bring my hand down with a sudden slap, they get away. They dance above my head as I inspect my fingers for their corpses.

  This is draining. This speculative talk of the anus and the cock. I should have anticipated the shame. But with my horror my confidence grows, and so too does the plot. The truth. Running at me like a tit-head with a baton. Preparing to make me with violence.

  Again, I’m bullshitting you! I’m blowing smoke directly into your arse. It’s only because I need relief. A break from the truth with its dialogues and desires.

  Is this pornography?

  Please, say that it is not. No, let me rephrase that. Please, let it be so.

  I had a visit from my Narrative Health Aid worker this morning. We’re all very nameless in here, that’s the way it goes. But this woman, whose job it is to monitor my writing and to generally irritate me, I have secretly named Susan. Susan is a simple sort, I’ve known her most of my life. She’s never been a massive fan of my work, but I don’t suppose she ever expected me to go this far. To write this . . . this history.

  Susan, it transpires, is horrified and astonished. She arrived, her plain clothes billowing around her so as to hide her figure from my eyes. We watched each other silently for a few seconds. I smiled. And oh, dear Susan, she was white faced. She was wondering how the hell I got access to the Evernet system. She paced my room in a panic. She said, you shouldn’t be doing this, it’s unhealthy. She said, who on earth allowed this to happen? And I was like. I just kept smiling.

  She’ll be reading this, of course. And for me, that’s an exciting thought. Are you well, Susan? I picture you curled up in bed with a mug of hot chocolate, sporting a complicated, lacy underwear affair. Suspenders. Difficult straps on your thighs, cotton flowers decorating the brimming cups of your bra. Oh, forgive me, dear Susan. I’m sure I’m taking the piss. I’m safe, no probs, you needn’t be afraid. I’ve seen the way you look at me.

  Susan won’t like me talking like this. You don’t like it, do you, Susan? She’ll return here tomorrow, a cloud of billowing white, shouting, how on earth? How on earth? She’ll tell me my learning is killing me. She’ll say I’m trying to defend myself when I ought to be writing from my guilty heart. Simple Susan, don’t fret. I know more than you imagine.

  Enough.

  I write because I have discovered a story. And because they only give us words to play with.

  Three months later. Justin and Rebecca in a living room. We are going straight back to the facts.

  16

  The Counter-revolution

  JUSTIN’S FOREFINGER WORKS its way up into Rebecca’s hair, towards the end of her spine and the southern perimeter of her skull. It begins to massage her head in small, circular movements. It can’t be more than two centimetres from her brain.

 
‘Jesus Christ.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I’ve never seen so many people.’

  Rebecca and Justin are entwined. They’re in the living room of Rebecca’s newly acquired flat in Hulme. Watching television in the soft vanilla light of the lounge. The smell that you notice is coming from the last surviving particles of the exquisitely cooked meal they shared this evening. A prawn curry with coriander and sweet potato. Over the next few minutes the smell of quality cuisine will be overwhelmed by the aromas of three thick, scented candles burning on the coffee table: lavender, tea tree, hemp.

  ‘Would you like some more wine, Becca?’

  ‘Yeah, I’ll get it.’

  ‘No, you stay there. I’ll bring it through.’

  Justin withdraws his fingers from Rebecca’s hair. She feigns a kind of blissful weightlessness and allows her head to slump backwards on to the cushions. This is a way of showing him that his subtle massaging was a success. A way of showing her appreciation.

  ‘Oh, that was heaven. I’m so tired.’

  The wine has been left to chill in the fridge because it would have been spoiled in the warmth of the room. Justin pours it slowly and the sound of cold, trickling liquid merges with the serious voices coming from the television. The television screen is full of protesters. Antiporn has begun.

  ‘Where do they get their energy from, Justin?’ Rebecca asks, picking up her wine glass from the coffee table and taking a minuscule sip.

  ‘The same place as us, I expect. Their dismay, or probably just their boredom.’ Justin watches the screen with unresolvable anxiety. He finds it hard to watch civilisation fuck up in the face of its participants. So does Rebecca. They both believe in sex. Having replaced her own glass on the coffee table, Rebecca picks up Justin’s and hands it to him.

  ‘They’d think we were monsters, wouldn’t they?’