The Decadent Handbook

by Rowan Pelling

  ‘I don’t think it’s wrong,’ I say. The sisters know that I think it is, but pretend to find me utterly convincing. In the old pigsty the four oil-spots of their pupils bloom.

  We pull ourselves into the derelict loft space where the farm implements lie, abandoned to us, their iron wickedly cast and their wooden handles smooth as bobbins: who wouldn’t touch them, wouldn’t urge that they be touched, wouldn’t feel them infused with honest sweat and sweat themselves to imagine them put to stranger use?

  Chains and bridles; a saddle cracked and furred with dust; the damp webbing of milky stains that only prove we’re the same as those who were here once, then died: that despite us the work of history will happen in the shadows beyond the circle of our burning single-mindedness.

  And how deep in the woods we hold our palms to a fireplace, ringed with black stones, and feel remnant heat like a body’s while the branches pluck lovingly at our clothes!

  And how the duck pond’s unfathomable green induces us to look with awful concentration!

  And how in a meadow scabbed with old cowpats, the grass growing higher from them and more emerald, we turn up a trove of sweet-smelling magazines and sit sorting through them, the sisters and I, insatiably separate, the exposed roots of the oak they were pushed between now darkly, erotically interior as rain starts to fall and lacquer the bark and the women holding themselves open come apart in our hands.

  This countryside’s for hiding in; is full of holes and lovely burrows, their bone-strewn entrances spicy and damp. We never consider the city, its chimneys and alleyways, for the fields and the hedgerows are world enough: the dusty leaves like filthy tongues; the hedgehog fizzing with lice when we lean in close to test its prickling with a stick; the rusty stream dribbling through the reeking undergrowth: such imperfection!

  The puddles are dieseled with the shades of our mothers’ eye-shadows, the evening sky flawed with intimate pinks.

  Summer, and our science is to take turns peeing in the water trough and then to return, week after week, to see the water thickening with piss-weed. The excitement of the life lodged within us, inaccessible but for our blood and our piss, which must swarm invisibly to grow what it has in the sunlit trough!

  And there’s itchy skin if we handle the fresh corrugated stems of the cow parsley, and earwigs to be shaken out later when the same stems brittle. There are wet beds if we taste the milk squeezed from a dandelion stalk. There’s ringworm like a brand on the first sister’s temple, that I can’t help believing is punishment, and fear for myself in the night.

  And her father catches us, far from the village. He comes upon us in a tumbledown place with hay on the floor (for everywhere we newly discover has already been found and neglected). And it’s not what we’re doing but the way that we jump. He drives his daughters on ahead of him, over the barbed-wire fences and up the rutted lanes, his mysterious, canvas hunting bag swollen at his side.

  I’m left alone out there with the wind pouring South all around me. He’s said nothing to help me configure my crime. He’s given me no name I might call myself while resolving to never be called it again; so my crime becomes loneliness, and the accusatory wind finds its way into my head. I carry it all the way home.

  Now the sisters will not leave their garden. They have a new friend with a nose like a pig’s and the three of them throw stones at me over the hedge. I lurk in the field behind the house, at the foot of the rookery where I find bald, stringy chicks thrown down from their nests.

  There’s murder, too, on my mind, and as if it’s simply enough to be thinking it, the farmer hails Matthew Byrne and I one Sunday from high in the cab of his tractor. We’re walking past his hay barn. He’ll pay us twenty pence, he says, for every mouse or rat he turns out from the haystack with his forklift and we kill on the floor of the barn. He gives us a length of black plastic pipe each. We spend the afternoon chasing around the vast, airy hall as it echoes to the forklift’s groaning hydraulics and the crack crack crack of our sticks on the dusty cement. We arrange the small corpses for the farmer to count, nudging them into line with the toes of our boots. They hardly seem dead, there’s so little blood.

  Later, my mother asks me what I’ve been doing all day. I lie to her quickly. I’m already a different person to the one I believe she sees, standing in my clothes.

  Matthew Byrne will soon call at my door and take me down the back lanes where he’ll point to a colossal turd, curled at the edge of a nettle patch. He’ll make me admit that it’s mine, and we’ll never speak again.

  The sisters’ mother will die in the winter, on the bend outside the village. I’ll go looking for her blood among the cubes of broken windscreen scattered over the road.

  One morning afterwards, as if nothing’s happened, the sisters will invite me to stand with them on the ice covering the cistern behind their house. The ice will creak and we’ll look down at the bubbles frozen into it and the dark water, as deep as we’re tall, still liquid far below.

  Decadent Drinking

  The Last Big Drinky

  Salena Godden

  Wednesday

  It started when she finished the radio show last Wednesday, now seven days later there are lines of empty bottles, eighteen vodka, six gin, various wine and champagne bottles, Bailey’s and Schnapps, in a row by the bin along the kitchen wall by several plastic bags of crumpled beer and cider cans. She shows me her tongue it’s furred green. She washes towels and bed sheets; coated in pizza, booze, fag ash, blood and come. She shows me a note the neighbour upstairs left asking if everything was alright, he saw the ambulance the other night. It was an accident, the girl with golden hair fell, they were trying to get her to sleep it off a bit in Saliva’s bed and she fell face first and smacked her forehead open. It looked like a second right eyebrow; the gash pissed blood everywhere, we had to keep the photographer’s dog from licking it and you could see deep inside, something like skull-bone or matter.

  ‘I am having a bit of a drinky from this week’s radio show through to next…’ We heard Saliva announce on air and that was that. Now Saliva doesn’t remember where she put each end of the piece of string, it comes in flashes, could be the beginning or the middle or the end of the story, but I was there and one thing is for sure she was in the pub everyday. I also know that really was the last big drinky.

  It was a laugh, like when the boys were dressed in her underwear and swimming goggles and they ran out into the street in February’s first falling snow, it fell in lovely flakes and we all danced barefoot in the road, holding our tongues out to catch snowflakes. Another neighbour came out and said something about being quiet. We apologised, tried to quieten down, but then we forgot about that and opened another bottle of frozen vodka playing that song we love. Saliva got new poems out and Carcass read aloud in his booming Shakespeare voice and we all fell about laughing. It was a wild week, a carefree careless full moon, a lawless restlessness. I kept throwing lemons and tomatoes at Babyblue’s head until I was sick. I peuked in the bathroom sink and Saliva looked after me, I was going to try and sleep on the toilet but she called me a lightweight whilst pushing my sick down the plug hole with her finger.

  Thursday

  ‘What are we drinking? BBC?’ Carcass asked

  ‘ No, I sold a poem.’

  ‘Nice! So which poem are we drinking then?’

  ‘ “I Don’t Do Love” … they paid cash into my account, thirsty?’

  Saliva orders another round of black sambuca and pints to chase

  ‘Here’s to “I Don’t Do Love” Carcass bellows ‘You don’t do love, loves does you.’

  ‘I don’t do love, love does me, now lets have a drinky…’

  It was winter dusk light when she awoke wondering if she had slept all night or all day and then she didn’t know which day or time it was. Saliva woke up twitching, she has vodka orange whilst she brushes her teeth, she says the mint toothpaste would make the orange taste shit so she brushes her teeth with vodka. She washes her f
ace in ice-cold sparkling water from the bottle. She wears yesterday’s suit with tomorrow’s shirt and stops at the off-licence to pick up vodka, cranberry, couple of bottles of champagne and two packets of cigarettes on the way to the pub, so she wouldn’t miss closing on the way back. She sat at the bar and talked to the barman holding her pen erect. She had her notebook open on a blank page to write, but the barman talks to her and she keeps answering him. She wanted to write about this dream she had about the rose petals she has been collecting in pint glasses in rows around the skirting boards of her flat, but instead all she scribbled in large curly letters is a new word she’s made up – Vodrosekapetal.

  ‘It’s funny! Taste this Malibu, tastes like suntan oil.’ She smirks dirtily, she says it tastes like sun tan lotion and drinks it ordering doubles for us all because it tastes like holidays. That was the night Saliva invited the golden haired girl back with everyone else, including me, Babyblue and Carcass; Saliva invited half the pub back to hers, as usual everybody back to Saliva’s. The photographer, the barman, Buddhist lady, the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker, there were loads of us in the apartment. The golden girl, poor thing, she fell and had to have eight stitches, we found out in the pub the next day when we were all having brunch-time pints of Bloody Mary.

  People came and went that week; it was like Paddington Station, but timeless and continuous. Sleep? I remember passing out when the room was a haze of grey smoke and that violet light of dawn was seeping through a crack in the curtains. Babyblue and Saliva went to bed together to have sex they won’t remember. She likes it, though, because Babyblue is her favourite. He’s a beautiful six-foot-six, twenty-year-old boy with the colouring of honey and summer hay bales, and he loves Saliva. He lives in what she calls the treats and surprises compartment of her head, the good times chamber in her life; they only do good times together, nothing heavy. They hook up, have a laugh, have a fuck and drink and that suits them both fine.

  Friday

  Someone puts Iggy Pop ‘I wanna Be Your Dog’ on nice and loud, I had crashed with Carcass at my feet like a wolfhound. We take a pinch of snuff, pour morning vodka oranges down us and spring back into a new drinky. That was the day we went drinking around Camden all afternoon and on leaving The Good Mixer near closing time I watched Saliva in the market on Inverness Street. There were rotting peaches, apricots in the gutter and decomposing grapes and squashed tomatoes. She shouted to the night sky, said it was merely an old black blanket with moth holes of sunlight, ‘We are not even as clever as ants, we are tiny human bacteria, even the stars are distinguishing, the stars are distinguished,’ she laughed out loud to herself, saying she meant to say extinguished and on the other side of the street I saw a little girl in a red coat tugging on her mothers hand,

  ‘Mummy look at the funny lady.’

  ‘Don’t stare dear.’

  Back at Saliva’s we fall out of a cab none of us remember getting into. That was when Saliva got us to lay on the bed and she threw those pints of rose petals all over us. I looked up and saw it snowing outside and inside with rose petals, it was beautiful, glass upon glass of soft fresh rose petals. A petal soaked in vodka on your tongue that’s a vodrosekapetal, Saliva kept saying, vodrosekapetal, vod-rose-ka-petal … and then somebody made noodles. They are half eaten in fistfuls but mostly thrown around, they stick to your face, splat your cheek and the ceiling, there is a weird smell as the light bulb fries noodles, the wooden floorboards are covered in a carpet of wilting petals and ripped open fruit like the market on Inverness Street whilst the windows are battered with heavy snow. Mushrooms and rose petals, they taste good together, we eat Mexican liberty caps wrapped in rose petals.

  Me and Saliva start sucking noodles off his belly … Kissing me and Saliva kisses him and then we three kiss and there is that electricity of anticipation and so we say shall we? Then we say why not? Kissing and stumbling into the bedroom to roll around the bed until daylight’s a sodden blur of breathy exchanges and then we pass out exhausted covered in a fog of drunken sex with the first shards of sunlight streaming through the wide open window.

  Saturday

  Waking up he lifts the white sheet to see it was not a dream, entwined and naked, we are a six-legged animal. Saliva gets up and says, ‘I think this calls for a drinky! Coffee is what normal people drink in the morning!’ she laughs, naked and swigging the best part of a litre of Bailey’s,

  ‘Nice, try it, it’s a bit like coffee and drinky …’

  Saliva is in the middle … I can feel both fingers slipping in and out together … three fingers slide inside…we look into our eyes and faces and we nod and are in this together … and we are … and we take it in turns, curling tongues around the skin … as if underwater … and in slow motion … we are an octopus and we move over and under each other … we become a pit of snakes … it sounds like feeding time at the zoo … we are greedy … filled … filling … at the same time … and on all fours but on six legs … feeling it slapping softly against fingertips … a timeless place … the possibilities and pleasure endless … we are three … rolling over each other, under each other and into each other’s arms … legs thrown over shoulders and mouths open and gasps until … ah … rub it in … belly and breasts … splutter and laugh … and its time for a little smoke and a little drinky.

  Sunday

  We talk sitting upright cross-legged in a triangle under the sheet like a white tent … daylight passed into night and then dawn was rosy lighting up pinkish snow outside … a feathery place … glasses of frozen vodka and orange … a careless white underworld … we smoke blue smoke … caked in wet and petals and outside it snows again and fat snowflakes fly onto the bed and we peek out from the covers into the courtyard at the flurry, at the white trees and rooftops and we find the white world outside is inside and it’s a beautiful place … we are in love there and then … in that very moment … we decide to get married … the three of us and then … we discuss sticking a lemon up there … pinned between them … squealing and ticklish and wriggling whilst they take it in turns to … kissing each other at the same time … we put on fishnet tights which are ripped at the gusset … sighing and holding hands … taking it in turns slowly … we tie him up … he ties us up … we are handcuffed together and we’ll lose the keys … we laugh and kiss … he watches …it’s ridiculous … it’s twister and hysterical … she is coming … I am coming … we are laughing … blind-folded … he is delirious … we are cock-drunk … he is cunt-blind … he kneels in front of a spaghetti of ripped fishnetted legs in a snowdrift … four legs in a meringue … three tongues catch snowflakes … two cunts held open by thirty fingers … one cock crowing in the dawn and coming over a million hairs.

  Monday

  It’s chronic daylight and Saliva and I drink cold tins of cider and the phone won’t stop ringing. She lights a fag, takes a deep breath and answers, it’s a one-day workshop, its been cancelled. Saliva doesn’t care, she is not convinced she will be able to tell kids how great a poet’s life is, not today, let them find out for themselves. The phone rings again, it’s a bit of telly, they want an interview and a poem. Saliva says she won’t do it for free, I am smoking a fag listening as she pulls faces and hand gestures ‘wankers’ at the phone receiver …

  ‘What is it with you Media types anyway? I know how this goes, first you will tell me that its just a little chat and a poem, then you edit my shit so I fill your polemic and tokenism AND you’ll try to justify your salary by getting creative on my shit but ask me to do it for free … don’t tell me it’s good for my CV …’

  Saliva is a tiger, pacing she pounds the floor stretching the phone line and says,

  ‘CV? I am my CV. I’ll have to suffer you crudely cutting my work, the good lines will be edited out because they are too RUDE! Why do you people persist in coming to me in the first place? You should go get Pam Ayres – she’s clean. Why come for me when you know my work and have seen me live! SOMETIMES I CAN BE A RIGHT DIRTY BIT
CH! GO GET PAM AYRES! PAM AYRES IS DAYTIME FAMILY FUN … WHAT? What do you mean? You people treat poetry like ordering pizza, you say you like it but instead of cheese can you have custard? I will tell you custard and pizza don’t work but you think you know all about poetry and you’ll argue armed with the bit of Hughes and Plath you had to do in school, you say instead of cheese lets have custard on pizza! Having lured my starving arse out to dinner on expenses at Soho House, you’ll sit there thinking you are now a poetry editor. Then you will film me somewhere humiliating like an open-top tourist bus in Oxford Circus at rush hour dressed like a chicken and wonder why it doesn’t resonate with the same delivery as when you saw me read in the Colony Rooms. To add insult to injury you will spell my name wrong and you’ll phone me with insipid, ridiculous suggestions at all hours, you’ll suggest using toffees instead of mushrooms and buttons instead of olives and shampoo instead of tomato sauce, like now all of a sudden you know all about pizzas? Now you know all about poetry? And I get to do all this for free? You’ve got the commission right? Are you doing YOUR job for free? Is the camera-man free? Is this BBCharity? I bet there is money in the budget for your colonic irrigation, your Christmas in Goa, but the monkey on the screen, ME I do it for ZERO … then I get stopped and frankly harassed in the pub by some smart ass saying have you ever tried using pepperoni on pizza because they saw ME on telly using pennies for pepperoni sausage and I will have to tell them it was YOUR stupid idea and YOUR editing that used PENNIES instead of PEPPERONI … but its ME on the idiot box flipping over like the funny monkey … so throw me a peanut, why don’t you peel me a banana? And? Yes please do, you do that, you check the budget … pennies instead of pepperoni I don’t think so chump … check your budget and then you get back to me … thank you.’