Friction

by Joe Stretch

  But where is the grand annihilation? The loud bang? Why on earth does weather still occur? Surely the clouds have become tired of all this armpit sniffing, combing, styling, killing rubbish. Surely the sun and the moon no longer give a shit.

  Steve puts the shopping bags on the pavement. He disentangles the different handles from his fingers, admiring the brands on the bags; the sorts of bags you keep and reuse: Gucci, Prada, Vivienne Westwood. Ha, the trendy primates! He searches through the various bags until he finds what he’s looking for: a red silk tie, decorated with pin-thin stripes of black. With his head turned towards the yellow sky, he ties the tie around his head and fluffs his blond hair out of the top. This isn’t fashion. This is a sartorial salute to the end of the world and his life. Steve breathes through his clenched teeth. Will I even be able to get to her?

  Further down the road, up some stairs and through a couple of doors is Carly. Carly has crawled into the kitchen of Steve’s flat to find some food. The cool air of the fridge soothes her frazzled body. The refrigerated breeze brings to mind the outside world. She hasn’t thought about outside in ages. Not since she was last there, which was months ago. She suddenly remembers her shopping trips to town. All the money. The trips to Versus and the cold beers in the bars of Deansgate. She’s confident she doesn’t miss it; outside, I mean. It was shit, she thinks to herself, it was boring.

  The area of charcoal skin is expanding. It stretches now between her bellybutton and her knees, and over and between each breast. It crossed her mind a long time ago how much damage she was doing to herself. The shattered coffee table left her with scars that will never fully fade. But what was the point in beauty when it meant missing out on her darling? And, of course, life is simply the pursuit of pleasure, she believes. And she’s right; we bend ourselves in leisurely ways.

  As she sips water from a glass she only had the strength to half fill, Carly considers weeping. Wondering, for a second, whether Darling is worth the scorched skin and the hair loss. Worth enduring the pain she feels in its absence. She hasn’t seen Steve in weeks. Does she owe him an apology? She supposes that she does. Simply for becoming a shadow of her former self.

  The thermostat on the fridge cuts out suddenly; a silence floods Carly’s ear, annexing her little brain. She coughs to break it and begins scurrying in the direction of the bedroom; tears in her eyes and a babyish cackle rabbiting from her mouth: ‘Darling, Darling, Darling.’

  Steve heaves his shopping bags the last few steps to the front door. Ice in his eyes. Carly’s shrieks in his ears.

  ‘Darling, Darling, Darling.’

  He opens the door and swings both arms forward, throwing bag after bag on to the floor in front of him. Carly stops dead, crouched still on the floor. Her mottled grey scalp visible through the lonely strands of her hair.

  ‘Darling, Darling, Darling,’ she bleats, edging backwards extremely slowly on all fours, purring air into the room. Steve stands with his legs wide apart and his hands on his hips. The bandanna around his head. Sweat trickling down his back.

  ‘What have you done, Carly?’ he says, looking down at her. She appears primed to pounce, like a large, fast cat: a leopard. A starving leopard.

  What a cock, Carly’s thinking, her dry lips crisping into a grin. A bandanna? He comes to me after so long, topless and with a bandanna? Slowly and with considerable difficulty she rises to her feet. Her body uncreasing into a heavily curved but essentially upright position. Completely naked, the horror of her injuries is clear. Her cotton-thin limbs. Wasted waist. Her pelvis protrudes like antlers from her charred midriff, pointing towards her blackened tits and her haunted face. Tears rest in the crusted rivets of her eyes, forehead steaming like thick lava. A blessed anger and not a drop of shame.

  ‘I was bored, Steve,’ she says, in a slow voice of near masculine depth. She’s struggling to keep her balance, large blue-cheese veins pulsating in her feet. The lovers observe each other in total stillness. A gloopy tear the consistency of semen drops from Carly’s eye. She sniffs and growls, her lips pursed and her back arched in agony. Steve attempts to plot the history of her decay; he examines her loins and tries to excavate their perfection. Carly glances down to where her conspicuous ribs suck into her barren stomach.

  ‘Well, what have you done, Steve?’ she says, throwing a circular smile in the direction of his bandanna. Steve reflexes his pectoral muscles and fills his lungs with gallons of air. What could he say? Have I collapsed? he thinks, or have I simply gone mad? Or am I a victim of change and dreadful circumstance? He sighs. Can I turn this fucker around and affect the world?

  ‘I’ve gone out of fashion,’ he says, walking towards her as he does so, preparing to hold his burnt lover and bring her close to his chest. ‘I’ve gone out of fashion, my love!’ he says again, this time with tears in his eyes and snot choking from his nostrils. As his large hands reach for Carly’s cheeks she drops to the floor; he lunges at the tiny space her face had once occupied.

  ‘Darling, Darling, Darling!’

  Carly crawls towards the bedroom with her face close to the carpet, as if sniffing for insects.

  ‘Carly, please.’

  Steve follows her in. Carly’s on the bed when he arrives, grappling with the Sex Machine, attaching the pads with a revolting energy and reaching for the switch. Steve dives for her body, grabbing her tissue-paper skin. His hands grip her arms but the machine is already on. He feels volts of electricity searing up his arms and into his shoulder blades. Already she’s shrieking: an incessant squeak located halfway between life and death. Oh, what to do here? We waddling tragedies; what to do amidst this titillating sham? This absurd life: so day-to-day. What to do here but watch and wank? Yes. Ha. The age of watch and wank. Steve withdraws his hands and pulls the plug from its socket, causing Carly to take a deep breath with a ghostly dry howl.

  ‘I’m out of fashion,’ says Steve.

  ‘Turn it back on,’ shouts Carly, her fingernails breaking off as she claws at Steve.

  ‘I love you. You’re taking me from me . . . me, man!’

  Steve kicks off his trainers with their shiny, crystal-studded tongues. He tears off his denim legs and leaps for his love.

  ‘I’m a man,’ he shouts.

  ‘Turn on the machine,’ she screams.

  ‘Man!’

  ‘Machine!’

  Steve grabs the machine, ripping the pads from Carly’s body in one victorious tug, causing her to scream. He falls on to her, almost recoiling in disgust at the membraney insubstantiality of her skin. Carly makes a lunge for the floor but her strength is long gone. She feels herself being grabbed by the remains of her hips and pulled into that familiar position. Sex, she recalls, that dead dog of a pastime. That distant age of in and out, back and forth. Pah! That spitty, grovelling land of love. She almost gags as she notices her buttocks being parted and feels Steve’s manicured fingers looking for an orifice.

  ‘Darling, help me, Darling,’ she cries, but the Sex Machine lies limp and confused in the corner of the room. Steve stares down at Carly’s body. He holds his cock in his right hand. Oh, the blighter; the silly instrument. Could I guide it past the sharp mounds of burnt dead skin that spoil her loins? He thinks. Is this what is left? He prods at her with his penis. A prodding penis. A blushing one. Wobbling about in the air around a girl. I can’t do it. Steve feels a revolting gurgle in his throat. The distant age of in and out, of back and forth.

  Carly’s neck is bent crooked, her eyes straining at Darling; the betrayed machine scattered in the corner, forced to watch her with a man. The activities taking place towards the southern boundary of her body seem entirely alien. Like a foreign custom that she fails to understand. Steve has a hot hand on each arse cheek. This seems so strange, so unreasonable really. Where was the development, the exciting change? It’s an exhausted lifestyle. The feeling of human skin on human skin has all of a sudden lost its aura. Its attraction. To Carly, it seems like the most unnatural sensation.

&n
bsp; Steve continues to watch his cock. Awaiting its decision. Carly listens to his whimpering; a bedraggled smirk drifts over her face. She pictures her womb, something she’s never done before, the sorry organism slumped among the other stuff. Bladder, bowels, lungs and kidneys. What a strange little hostel to be carrying around. It suddenly seems so out of date. The kind of bizarre appendage that evolution ought to have forgotten about. A stupid container of no use to her. Because time is simply not our element. We inhabit something more akin to forgetting. A sort of gloopy forgetfulness, where sex is a niggling memory and reproduction its perverse effect.

  Steve holds Carly in place. A cock full of blood. A big body. A mood bulb brain.

  ‘Man meat, eh? I could do you. I’m a sex god,’ he shouts. ‘In bed, I’m really brilliant.’

  ‘Mach . . . ine,’ says Carly though gritted teeth.

  ‘I could take you to heaven, baby. I’m a guy. I could take you to heaven.’

  Steve grabs Carly’s hair, tugging at a clump till it tears from her scalp and she yelps in horror. He grabs her tiny waist. She’s so light he can almost suspend her in mid-air. He traces the dotted bones of her spinal column down from her neck. We are growing thin. Us lot, we’re pretty dirty. Life is unsatisfactory. My poor little penis, thinks Steve. It never knew. He brings his head to rest on Carly’s charred back. A tail bone pressed into the socket of an eye. We could have made love into the small hours. We could have fallen side by side and exhaled through smiles. Steve weeps. Another world finishes to the sound of its inhabitants hissing.

  Steve feels a heaving weight of semi-digested matter battling up the pipes in his neck, too dry and large to surface. He gags, struggling to breathe. Carly takes her chance and falls from the bed and scuttles over to the machine. Steve’s at his knees on the bed, Carly’s struck by some strangely unnatural red blotches on his arse. How does nature find the will to decorate us in deformities? Who would have the patience? She holds one of the Sex Machine’s pads to her black breast, an explosion of what looks like sympathy occurs, deep in the technologies of her eyes. And then she sings.

  ‘Oh my darling, oh my darling, oh my darling, Clementine.’

  A smile bubbles to the surface of Steve’s face. It’s a nice surprise. He pushes it to its extremes by stretching his grinning mouth and raising his cheeks as high as they will go. Carly continues to sing.

  ‘You are lost and gone for ever, dreadful sorry, Clementine . . .’

  Steve turns his head to see Carly softly serenading the Sex Machine, her head tilted, stroking it gently with her knuckly hands. Her vocal is broken but pure and from the heart.

  ‘You are lost and gone for ever . . .’

  Steve’s features drift to rest, pulling the kind of face a hermit might pull; a face unfamiliar with the world of expressions. He gets down from the bed, his penis shrivelled to a fist, bloody and mangled from the fight.

  Carly doesn’t even glance at him as he walks past her out of the door to the living area. She continues to sing gentle lullabies to her machine. But the machine – does it wink at Steve as he leaves? No, no of course it doesn’t. How could it?

  Limping into the living room, how wonderful. Steve stares at his flat. How funny. An amusing shelter. The empty space of the flat reminds him of Frank, the large bastard who so often filled it with his excessive proportions. He thinks of Justin, too. His easy manner, how the three of them will soon be so rich. How they’ve pimped the Sex Machine for millions.

  He goes to the sink and runs the cold tap on full tilt. Running water always seemed the most blissful example of civilisation. The intricate system of underground pipes and pistons, it makes him want to laugh out loud when he compares the project to his own current state. The weeks he’s spent buying. The blind man. The efforts he’s gone to to avoid the gaze of others.

  His nude body seems a cosy arrangement of traditions, jokes and sporting references. His shapely thighs, firm feet, rounded pectorals. What a joke. And the people in the streets; the hen parties and the protesters. It’s best that their mysterious motives and thoughts remain just that – a mystery. Parliaments and markets; proud fake ideas. Pop concerts, peace rallies, carnivals, birthdays, fetes. Public transport and the bombs that are detonated on it. It’s all so curious. So incredibly curious. The actions of a minority, in whose bodies energy inexplicably remains.

  Steve can still make out the sound of Carly’s singing voice seeping through the walls. So strange of her to sing, especially such an old song. He can’t help but imagine those fascinatingly crusty sections of her brain. The parts he’d never known where she must have stored all this gentle sentimentality. The nineteenth century, the twentieth, the past; so cute.

  He turns off the tap and moves over to the pile of shopping bags by the door. He kicks half-heartedly at one of the bags. Isn’t football wonderful? he thinks. The way they rip down the wings, cross, score, celebrate and rue with such sincerity. Yes, it’s truly wonderful. But reality’s ice must always thaw, so Steve moves towards the cutlery drawer. From which he removes a knife.

  Looking back, Steve assumes that deep down all he ever wanted was money. If you hold your breath and dive under rocky pretence and swim over the brittle coral of honour, well, all you ever find is the barnacled shell of cash, and in it the pearl of guilt; shame. The large compromise that loving Carly represented was little more than an odorous truth. As I said so long ago, Steve doesn’t know anyone who can resist someone who is as fit as fuck. Was it that? I don’t recall.

  He takes the knife and sits with it among the shopping. Carly’s singing has stopped. He imagines life as the Sex Machine and there is a brief flare of joy right at the back of his head. The lucky fucker. Nothing but a selection of straps and electrical pads to contend with. And just one purpose. It’s surely the rainbow of responsibilities contained in life that makes it such a game. Think, dress, eat, be nice, love, earn. What a creature of idealism the human is. Make me a Sex Machine, thinks Steve. Forget society and make me a Sex Machine. Then I’ll show you the meaning of fun.

  Steve places the tip of the knife just under where his perfect jaw curves and heads up towards the childishly smooth skin around his ear. He pierces easily. He’s amazed at the self-control he retains. He’s able to cut a misplaced red smile across his neck while maintaining full consciousness. He feels the blade strike the corresponding bone on the other side of his face. Success. The blood flows and warms his chest.

  ‘I’m out of fashion,’ he murmurs, as the blood dribbles down his sides and is absorbed by the shopping bags around him. The up-to-the-minute designs soak up the rich brown muck.

  As he bobs hopelessly on the surface of life, spurting blood pulling him down, he hears the sound of Carly screaming; a shriek of Darling, Darling. He reaches out and delves into the bags around him. He feels the fresh fabric. The distressed denims. The silks. The satins. The old skins; spilling on to them his blood.

  ‘I’m out of fashion,’ he whispers, bobbing on the surface of life. He sinks perhaps, dies, of course. Is pulled down, or up; whatever.

  35

  Computer Game Hell

  SMILE. THERE ARE things to live for. We’ll list them together later. For now, there’s one last end. Back to the bathroom. Everything important happens in bathrooms.

  It was the unexpected desire to vomit up each of his vital organs that made Colin a little nervous. Now he’s on his hands and knees, back looping and arching, tongue dangling above Rebecca’s corpse, hacking and hacking. His Adam’s apple is lurching up and down his neck. He suspects he’s sweating his brain out through the pores of his forehead, that’s why his thoughts are losing clarity and he’s so nervous. He’d barely come to terms with the fact he’d murdered a mother and her unborn child, when he himself began to die. It seemed an unlikely coincidence.

  But Rebecca isn’t dead. She’s listening to Colin’s strange sounds in some quiet corner of her consciousness. It feels as if the pain and the blood loss have reduced her to a small in
dividual who inhabits the innocuous nooks and crannies of her body. Gone for her are the days of living in her head. She’s convinced her consciousness and thoughts exist only in her kneecap, or her armpit perhaps. It’s hard to tell. It’s a fitting form for humanity to take, she thinks. We should never have been so big. We should never have used our heads. As her heartbeat becomes faint, she can still hear the strange groans and drillings of Colin’s body. The sound of the rat poison taking control.

  She’s been pretending to be dead for so long she’s anxious she might have indeed died. Certainly, she presumes her child is dead. She must. But her eyes won’t cry, weighted as they are with exquisitely fresh and sundried tomato. When you think about it – which she does – life’s a funny business. It is, isn’t it? Particularly when you think about it while dying on a bathroom floor. Pretending to be dead and listening carefully to the slow death of a young man you’ve poisoned. Yes, life is brilliant and simple.

  With an awful groan reminiscent of a birthing cow, Colin’s head falls into Rebecca’s stomach and the sounds and smells of him shitting himself drift through his legs towards the two young people. With his head still buried in Rebecca’s stomach, Colin breathes a deep breath, then he throws up over the girl and over the floor. Little bits of Italian-style bread. Mauled chorizo. Styled and treated meats. Blood-red mozzarella. It’s then that Colin notices the rat poison. The small turquoise pellets among the regurgitated food. Moments later he notices Rebecca’s heartbeat.

  . . . dudum . . . dudum . . . dudum . . . just a slight pulse – she’s still alive. Before Colin can react he’s dragged off into another disgusting cycle of shitting and vomiting. It’s colourful: red from his arse and turquoise from his lips.