Ménage Page 11
She had not even asked me to a club. It tormented me that she could use me as a pawn in such a way, as if she could ever make him jealous.
— Good idea, why don’t you fuck him too? Saul shouted back. — Then fuck off.
— Fine then, I shall, but we shan’t be coming back. She was at my door then, and I pretended I hadn’t been listening.
Just then Saul slammed his door and yelled, — Fuck you, I’m going clubbing – not you! And marched out.
Dot followed him and the argument ensued in the street outside the kebab shop. We never made it to a club or pub; they were both so drunk already and the fresh air must have hit them hard. I carried both their drunken weights back along Old Street. Terrible silences between them and I was the one in the middle, supporting their staggering rages. She tried to punch him and he tried to scratch her.
— Tell your bulimic bitch friend to fuck off and leave us alone, Saul said to me.
— Oh, so he’s not speaking to me, she said. — Well, tell your faggot friend that I think he’s a loser and drunk.
— Tell her she looks like a pig in shit.
— STOP, BEHAVE! Was I their translator now, their mediator? — Fucking spoiled brats, the pair of you.
They hated me for it, but still leaned on me, for stability. Like some comedy show of two cowards trying to hit each other, knowing that there was someone in the middle to restrain them both. The proof was, when I did nothing they desisted from their violence and both stared at me, as if I was a grown-up denying them sweets. All of this in full public display as we passed the jeering, whistling drunks by the George & Vulture.
If they had made a soap-opera version of Nietzsche’s eternal return for TV it would have been our flat; we were trapped in an endless rerun of the same day. She’d gone back to playing her old records, just to piss him off. On one typical morning Saul stormed past me to the bathroom, his eyes burning red through dark foundation, his kimono flapping behind him.
— I have but one goal today, to destroy the cultural hegemony of Joni Mitchell! he proclaimed, then vomited violently into the bath.
— You make me sick, she shouted from her room.
— Puke then, he called back, — it’s what you do best! But use the kitchen as the bathroom is occupied, and clean the plates when you’re done! And buy some Vim and cheese, would you? I’m a bit peckish.
It would not have gone on like that if they did not enjoy it. I feared I had become some kind of marriage-guidance counsellor or, worse, a pawn in some game designed to heighten their passions.
My position was puerile; as voyeur of their traumas I swear I felt more for both of them than they felt for each other. I sat by my door trying to make out their distant words and silences; I spied on them through the gap. It was like some avant-garde movie, sound and picture out of sync. I spent hours trying to work out the plot as they drifted in and out of shot and I caught snatches of dialogue.
Things were thrown, smashed, doors slammed, feet walking out only to return with screaming. Always her doing the throwing, the walking out, the returning, the screaming again. Always she who accused him of the same damn things. As soon as her foot was out the door he turned his music on full blast. Always the Wagner. There was a pattern to her returns too. Always with a 750ml of Smirnoff and he had never been able to afford Smirnoff and so let her back in.
She was back again with the booze and I was at my keyhole.
— You made me slash my canvases!
— I made you do nothing of the sort. We are each alone and must face the hell of our own making.
— Sozzle, please, just tell me what to do!
— Do you want me to make your art for you? he shouted. Art is dead! Go and kill yourself. I’m sure they’ll give you a posthumous first-class degree with honours.
— But you’re the artist! Not me, she shouted.
After a long silence she told him about how her chum Sarah Lucas had sold an ashtray to the Lieder Gallery for £65K. An ashtray, that was all it was, full of cigarette butts smoked by the artist.
— But you thought of it first! she was screaming at him. — An ashtray is an artwork. You said it months back, I think I might have even told her. That money should have been yours!
He upturned his ashtray on the floor to prove his point. She screamed: — You thought of it first! But she did it, she had the guts, and what have you done? Nothing, not ever. You break my heart. You’re nothing.
— Why thank you, Saul replied. — Like the Buddha I’ve always aspired to nothingness.
I heard his door slam and her footsteps in the corridor. Suddenly my door was thrown open. I jumped back onto the bed and pretended to be busy. Play-acting the sorting-out of my smalls. She was in tears, wanting a hug, wearing nothing but his Che Guevara T-shirt.
— He’s a monster!
— I know, I know. Shh, it’s OK.
And as I held her thin body in my arms, I felt myself becoming aroused. Considering it an inappropriate response to her grief, I cleared a space for her on my bed from among the dirty laundry and again found myself in the painful position of playing the role of best friend and confidant while my cock strained against my trousers, screaming at my hypocrisy.
— It’s no good, why can’t I . . . she said. I waited for her to finish.
— . . . how does he do it? I spend all day hating him, planning ways to go and then . . . How can I hate him so much but then I see his face and his scrawny legs and that fucking kimono and he’s drunk and I come crawling back? Why can’t I just . . .?
— Leave?
— Yes!
But no, I did not want her to leave him because if she did she would leave me too. And so I told her my theory about Saul and black holes and how they are collapsed stars, a negative space where a shining sun used to be and how its gravity was a million times greater than a live star, and how, for me, that was Saul, and how I’d tried to leave so many times too, but his negativity drew me back. How he did this to me too.
— Did he, did he really . . .? You’re so wise . . . so sweet to me.
Her big eyes looked down on me. I tried to put a safe distance between us and so sat on the floor, but it had been a grave mistake as when she crossed her long, long legs, I glimpsed the pink flesh flashing between. I fixed my gaze on the floor. She touched my shoulders.
— Oh, Owen. It was so cool last month, when we . . . if only we could go back to being like that again?
How could she sit like that, practically naked, holding my hand and be oblivious to the pain her touch caused me – to the fact that she herself had destroyed that glorious time we had had as three, when the flirtations were infinite and innocent? How could she not know how I longed to take those fingers of her and thread them through mine, to bury my face in those slender thighs just inches from my face, to release my agonised cock within her?
She pecked my forehead.
— You’re so wise, you’re a chum, a real chum.
That night I placed her panties by my pillow, her sweet musky lust. I could have wept. An impossible idea came to me then: that Saul knew of my longings and had placed her panties in the bathroom for me to find. That they were some secret communication to me – that he wanted me to help him, maybe even take her from him. Like the way he forced me into taking out his rubbish. He had made a mess of it with her and I was always there to clear up after him.
In the days that followed, I made an effort to be practical around the house. I cooked meals of pasta and ketchup and left them outside their doors. But the more I tried to be helpful the more they each seemed to resent me.
Dot’s plates of food lay uneaten and stacked by the foot of her door, and so I took the liberty of knocking. She was on the floor, trying to film her face from above with another moustache on, and lipstick, her whole face a mess; there was a half-empty bottle of wine by her side.
— So how’s the art coming on?
She pulled the moustache off and threw it down with a sigh.
— Really? Was that wise?
— Bastard said I could only get one name on my graduation certificate. These stupid old men, I just hate them.
I managed to work out that it was worse than she’d let on. If she didn’t attend art school that week and bring a new artwork for the group critique she would be chucked out.
— I can write down ideas, help you brainstorm, like we did before, if you want?
— You’re very sweet, but don’t waste your breath.
She was even starting to talk like him. Her eyes stared out of her window, to the rubbish bins and that stupid little tree by the fire escape.
— But really, what are you going to do now? I asked. Her hand fell weak on my knee, then suddenly made a fist.
— Fuck it all!
I watched then as she climbed into bed with the bottle and slugged from it. I saw how we could end up. Both of them drinking alone, me caught running from one room to the other, mop in hand, having to feed, clothe and clean up the vomit as they spiralled downward into a void that he would be the only one to climb back from. I needed to get her up and out of the place. My eyes scanned the crap on her floor and, amid a dozen crisp packets, stumbled on her gig tickets.
— C’mon, I said, — it’ll be even more revolting than Saul.
I dragged her out of bed and helped her get dressed, with no idea that the night to come would end with the start of an even more powerful spiral, not downward but up.
Saul had already said he would not be joining us, but decided to recant, no doubt because he was without money and she was leaving with the cash and there was, of course, the promise of stealing drinks at the gig, which was an old talent of his. Saul and Dot were on a mutual pact of ignoring each other so the taxi ride there was a hell of silences with me sat between them idiotically trying to get one then the other to say something. We arrived just as the support band was finishing. It was a typical student dive. The kids were grunge cyberpunk and pseudo saddo goth. The DJ started up as the road crew changed the kit onstage. Dot, for all her attitude with him, was wide-eyed like a kid and wanted to dance. (She confessed to me later that it was her first gig.)
Saul took one look at her jiving under the flashing lights, muttered — Philistines, and headed off to pinch some drinks. In less than three minutes he’d abducted three vodkas and Coke and I’m sure had stashed a pint in the lining of his greatcoat because he kept holding it out from himself then swearing as people bumped into him. Dot’s excitement was making Saul cringe terribly and as soon as the Revolting Cocks came onstage, Dot yelped and I could almost hear Saul’s sphincter tighten. The lead singer was wearing a wrestling mask and nothing else, apart from a foot-long prosthetic penis. — See, Dot shouted, — penises – everywhere! There was a surge to the front as the bass kicked in. An insistent monotonous ominous metallic drumbeat, then the first shriek of guitars. The rest of the band were in leather chaps, bare-chested, bare-arsed, with cowboy hats.
Lyrics were screamed, guitars wailed and the drumbeat pounded like a migraine-fuelled mechanical dildo, the words were all about sex machines and fucking. The hands of the crowd reached out to grab the lead singer’s plastic cock. The guy on the synth was crouched behind it, doing something, hidden, a line of coke or a snort of poppers. Then the stage-diving started. Saul’s face was unmoved by the spectacle, his arms crossed.
Dot wanted to go forward, pulling both of our hands. Saul refused bluntly. It was too loud to speak but he shouted in her ear. I saw him shake his head, then motion her away with his leather-glove-clad hand.
— Off with you, off with you both!
I was not as choosy as he. No matter what band, as long as it was loud, I threw myself into the mosh pit, well, the safer edges of it. We were standing a good ten feet behind the rest of the crowd and with all the stage-diving it was hard to see. Dot had her video camera out and started filming but was getting more and more frustrated. Shouting (I got the gist of it), — Sick of watching! Come on. She tried to pull me forward. I looked at Saul for permission, his face a picture of stoic negativity. A gig is a mass and he despised the masses. His ideal gig would have been one with him as the only spectator, which he then left after the first song.
To hell with him, I thought. Dot started geekishly jumping up and down so I joined in. Grateful when she pulled me deeper into the crowd, away from Saul’s eyes. There were not many girls there — one, totally stoned, was moshing in her bra, her face covered in piercings – green hair. Someone suddenly flew towards us. Doc Marten in face. I put my hands up in time to protect my face, but he must have hit Dot, she was reeling. I held her tight, shouted, — YOU WANNA GO BACK? IT’S SAFER! All the guys were eyeing her up. It must have been about the fifth song. The one I knew – ‘Stainless Steel Provider’. Dot shook her head and grinned at me, mad, kid-like; she’d given up on trying to film, the video camera, round her wrist, was annoying her. She shouted something.
— What?
Put her arm round. Sweet smell of her sweat. Repeated it.
— WHA?
Grinned, repeated it and hunched her shoulders when I didn’t get it.
— WHA? I DON –
She pulled back my hair and shouted it in my ear, her lips brushing my lobe, sending spasms through me.
— WE NEED . . .
She was jerked from me by the crowd as it surged forward again. I pushed through the seething mass to find her only four rows from the front. I grabbed her hand, but she pulled me in deeper. The lead singer was grinning evil as the bass guitar throbbed and the sampled loop was of a woman coming. He lifted his pink prosthesis and suddenly fake jism sprayed out, as if from a fireman’s hose. Guys were jumping open-mouthed to receive it, tongues reaching for the junk spunk. Dot, in hysterics, pulled me closer. I had a sudden desire to kiss her. We were hidden enough from Saul, he wouldn’t, couldn’t see, ten, twenty rows behind us. But still I sensed his gaze. The lead singer leapt from the stage, mike and cable and plastic cock, all in air. All hands reached to take his weight. He screamed into the microphone, — ‘I’M A KILLING MACHINE!’ Dot reached to touch his skin as the hands passed his body back to the stage. — I HAVE TO. HAVE TO. That was it . . . Dot had to – she kept shouting. — WHA? WHA? The next track had started. Chainsaw noise cutting through. Explosions. We were right next to the speaker. — PICK ME UP! she shouted, elbowing enough free room to show me with her hands – I had to throw her. I had never staged-dived in my life. Something about her camera, she was shouting. I had to take her camera, for safety. To throw her. I worried she’d get hurt. Kept trying to tell her.
She pulled away, smiling devilishly, gave me a little play-wave, shouted, — BYE! Grabbed my shoulders and hoisted herself up. Other hands took her then, lifted her from me, in the air, threw her, she flew.
I watch. She lands, stands on the stage, at first looks scared. The band are too stoned to care. A security man runs towards her. Hands of fifty men reach for her before she falls back. She looks out and then, mid-fall, closes her eyes, spreads her arms Jesus on cross and falls, forward. I rush to catch her. Many hands have her, feet past me, away from me. Fighting through to get to her. Floating on hands, greedy male fingers fondling her, a hundred, carrying her away to the back. I fought through. She landed feet first, catlike, hugged a man in leather. She threw her arms around me and grabbed my hair, smearing her lips across my face in an urgent embrace. Her tongue was in my mouth and my fingers found the flesh of her waist, our tongues circling dancing around each other, gasping, breathing through each other’s mouths in that wet, desperate kiss that went on and on as the lights flashed and my sex pounded and the music rose and our pelvises ground together.
Suddenly I had a dreadful sense that Saul had seen us. I separated from her and we looked into each other’s eyes, as if to say, yes, that was real, yes, it happened. She stroked my cheek, then, eyes huge and dark, smiled. I turned back to
where Saul had been standing but could not find him. Flashing elbows and heads were blocking my view of our table. I worried he’d maybe left in a fury of jealousy.
– GONE! I shouted to her.
– FUCK’IM. C’MON, and she pulled me back into the throng. — AGAIN, she kept shouting. — AGAIN. She wanted me to film her.
Through the lens the footage was like some form of rebirth, Hindu or Muslim or Aztec or something, some festival of sacrifice, the many hands reaching for her as she flew on fingertips.
Again, she landed, finding her feet in hysterics, just beside me. She shouted it was my turn. Covered me in kisses. Her sweat, wet on my cheek, armpits weeping sex, I shuddered. — YOU, YOU, she shouted, laugh as wide as the fucking sky, and threw me forward, not up. Off balance, hands picked me, arms, arse, then threw. I had a terrible fear of falling and reached to grab – anything. My fingers found metal. I clung, did not fall. Closed my eyes. Still had not fallen. Metal, warm, buzzing flying dream. I opened my eyes and was clinging to the lighting rig. Dot ten feet below, laughing at me, motioning for me to come down. I hung there, for maybe two more songs, too afraid to let go. The hanging man. I had the feeling I’d some day become an anecdote – ‘Remember the dork that hung from the lighting rig in ’92.’ I let go and fell onto the stage. The bouncers threw me back into the sweating mass. Dot was laughing mad as she and others caught me. She held me tight and led me to the back. To safety – to search again for Saul.
We found the empty table with the stolen drinks. A sense of dread seemed to come over us both. We ran a few steps, to the seats further into the dark, and let go of each other’s hands. There were only goths, predictably, lurking in the shadows.
She ran down the drink-spilled stairs and out, and there in the changing red–green lights of the taxi rank we found his dark profile.
— What’s up? You been out here long? I asked.
He shrugged and sucked on his fag, eyeing me suspiciously.
Dot was raving, trying to explain – the mosh pit – violent communal sexual – constant state of – animal-like – diving – how the music – touch of strangers – won’t let you fall – like how jumping is – like how she could weep.