Ménage Read online

  — I’m crap.

  — No, no, not at all, it’s just . . . Saul left us waiting for his aesthetic judgement.

  — The hair is the big problem, Saul finally pronounced. He looked at me for affirmation. What did I know?

  — Yes, those curls are far too preppy, the whole damned lot will have to come off.

  I thought he’d gone too far when she got up so suddenly and ran to the bathroom. I reproached him and told him to go a little easy on her.

  — It was beastly, bourgeois beastly.

  We heard sound of the bathroom door, slammed, locked.

  — Seriously, she might be in there slashing her wrists for all we know.

  — Change is the only thing in history that never changes!

  Minutes passed as I sat and smoked. I was freaked, I must admit, at how fast she’d jumped at his suggestion. He could be fickle and sometimes say things to dare people to acts of great stupidity, like the time we gatecrashed that rave in that mansion house in Islington and there were all these rich kids out of their tits on E. We were spliffing up on the third-floor balcony and he dared that stoner kid to jump. Everyone watched as the kid lowered himself over the edge then fell beyond sight, and everyone started screaming. But then the rich kid came limping back wanting to do it again, at which point Saul declared he was bored and wanted to leave.

  She called us from the bathroom and I ran through, Saul following slowly. I glimpsed scissors in the sink, a trace of blood on the ceramic bowl. I pushed in to find her shorn skull confronting me, but radiating with a smile.

  — Can you do the back for me? I can’t reach.

  — Ah, mon amour, Saul declared as she stood before us, fists full of hair.

  — Can you film us? she asked me. And so I did as Saul trimmed the back of her head to, practically, a skinhead.

  So we were back in Saul’s room and the volume was turned up and Nico was singing ‘Chelsea Girls’ as Dot paraded in front of the camera giggling to herself, her fingers feeling their way through her ravaged tufts, watching her new face on the live feed from the TV.

  And I had known this. That your face could be a stranger to you as you learn the contours of the world according to Saul. The sense of rebirth in the brutality of the scissors. With me it had been the opposite. I was too ‘socialist realist’ and had to grow my hair long, he insisted, to embrace the fop within.

  For hours we watched her striking TV poses. All of us singing along to ‘Heroin’ and ‘Sunday Morning’ and ‘Venus in Furs’ while Dot judged her face, pulling her skin tight, then pouting, checking herself against the Edie photos. Sticking her tongue out at her own TV-face. Laughing like a little girl, then falling silent as we watched the playback.

  — Mais, je suis pas Edie Sedgwick, Dot said glumly.

  — Non? Mais tu es fantastique! Superbe! Beaucoup better than Edie, mon petite cabbage. Tu es un très bon garçon he pronounced.

  — Moi, un garçon? She loved the idea. I had not said a word in French all night and had to say something.

  Her hand reached to bring me closer, then she brought Saul closer too, we got ourselves into position for the camera, all three of our heads on the TV screen, while she kissed us both.

  — Nous sommes les trois, toi et toi et moi. She giggled.

  Finally – something I could say. I got in there fast before Saul could.

  — Et nous sommes Jules et Jim!

  Laughter, but then she asked,

  — Et moi?

  I didn’t know the name of the character that Jeanne Moreau played, Saul seemed similarly perplexed, and I felt like a fool because the film was inappropriate – it ended in suicide, but none of us seemed particularly worried by this detail.

  We watched the playback but Saul was not convinced it was art. — It needs something more, he proclaimed, — a leap of faith, a jump into the dark!

  — Oh, but we didn’t film the cutting. I am so bloody . . . Dot was lost for words and threw the video camera onto the bed. Saul said, not to worry, he would film the hair in the sink. So we stood there in the bathroom as he did. But Dot was still dissatisfied.

  — We can’t miss any opportunities again, she said, — we must take a leap immediately and record it! She asked us for ideas, but I could think of nothing and Saul’s eyes were drooping from the drink. We slumped before the TV and Dot sat there between us, filming the screen: a surreal news report about President Bush throwing up in the lap of the Japanese prime minister. Dot recorded it and we played it back. Although he tried to hide it there was a dangling bit of noodle visible on his lip. We wept with laughter as we replayed it again and again. The world suddenly seemed impossibly beautiful.

  Dramatic changes occurred within Saul – I recall waking one day to find Dot filming him waltzing in a Miami shirt with the vacuum cleaner while Abba played at full blast. — Look, look, he declared with a flourish— it’s like Eno’s Music for Airports, or Fanfare for the Common Man. I envisage a whole series – music for chain smoking – music to sleep to – to take a shit to – Now That’s What I Call Hoovering Volume Twelve! I marvelled at how the presence of her camera had made him do a thing he’d maybe never attempted in his life.

  The very next day it was shoplifting that was the subject of Dot’s video life lesson. I went into Saul’s room and she was already sitting on his bed, dressed in his pinstripe flared trousers and authentic antique Nazi trench coat with real Luftwaffe swastika insignia and the pockets that, torn, went all the way to the bottom of the lining – ideal for the theft of shirts and spaghetti, nothing too large as that would ruin the line of the coat – and she was recording his infamous oft-delivered lecture on the ethical necessity of theft.

  — If everyone was to do it, he declared, invoking Kant’s categorical imperative, — we could finally destroy the rotting corpse of English capitalism . . . or at least the Hackney branch of Woolworths!

  He really was atrocious. I doubted he’d told her how he’d shoplifted almost his entire wardrobe from charity shops, his favourite being Save the Children in Islington because all the yuppies dropped their designer labels there, there was no electronic tagging and the old woman at the counter was half blind.

  Saul was testing her on strategy.

  — So, you walk in, then what do you do?

  — I take five or six things to the changing room . . .

  — Aha. And then?

  — Put on three layers of their stuff and then the trench-coat on top, and return the three others to the rails.

  — And then?

  — Leave?

  — No, no! You must buy a little shitty something, a 99p Depeche Mode CD or some socks, and have a little chat with the old dears. About anything really, the starving in Ethiopia or Bosnia or God or whatever, they’re so ecstatic to be talking to a nice young person who believes in their good work that they’ll never suspect you’re wearing five layers of their stuff.

  — But why don’t we just buy the stuff? Isn’t this a bit . . . unnecessary?

  — My dear, the only thing that saves us from the totalitarian tyranny of common sense is random acts of pure folly.

  How could she, I or anyone argue with such reasoning?

  As was agreed, we went to Save the Children and I was to record it. I considered this a dead giveaway but Dot, in miraculous ways, played it to advantage. She went straight up to the old dear and asked: — Is it OK, to film ourselves? We’re doing an art project for college.

  The old fossil seemed thrilled to bits. I was both dumbfounded and perplexed but followed Dot’s direction. To the hilarity of the old dear, Dot play-acted looking at clothes, then put them on one layer on top of the other. From beyond the eyepiece I could see Saul twitching by the doorway.

  — Keep filming, Dot winked at me.

  She pulled on a nice Armani-looking number and then a raincoat, all the time pulling funny faces for the old dear. Then with a nod at the camera, she paraded herself to the doorway as if on the catwalk. I kept on filming and c
ould hear the old dear’s giggles. As soon as Dot was outside, she paused, then without warning broke into a run. Saul and I shot each other a terrified glance. We looked at the old dear and saw the truth dawn on her face. We ran like fucking hell, as the screaming started.

  After three breathless staggering blocks we finally found her in the alleyway by Lucky’s Chinese. A siren screamed towards us, and we froze. It turned out to be an ambulance.

  — That wasn’t what I taught you! Saul shouted at her. Then smiled. — But it was bloody good nonetheless! Much to learn, you have, my apprentice, Saul grinned, — much to learn, as he shook his head, invoking Confucius or perhaps Yoda.

  So she was his apprentice. Who was I then? Perhaps she would take my place and I would become the femme de ménage for them both. As if she sensed my insecurity, she turned and kissed me, then made a show of kissing him too as she wrapped her arms round our shoulders and jumped into a puddle, splashing us both.

  Because we were not competing for her affections, not each trying to seduce her, due to our vow of amorous abstinence, because neither Saul nor I was trying to win her over to one side, the simplest, most banal of daily domestic tasks crackled with the electric static of sublimated desire. We found an old pot of paint in the street and danced around as we painted the kitchen bright orange. She made up names for us both. I was called ‘O’ as in ‘Oh’, which often came out ‘Oh-Oh’. And she called him Zarathustra after the Nietzsche he was trying to teach her.

  — There’s nuthin’ Neetcha can’t teach ya!

  Typically of an evening they would be in his room watching TV cuddled up together under the duvet, laughing at the so-called intellectuals on Newsnight debating for the nth time Fukuyama’s predicted victory of Western capitalism. The End of History and this is as good as it gets and the biggest shopping mall in the world has just opened. And I would pine to be in there with them as I sensed if I missed out on a single moment then she would be drawn more to him, but I fought the impulse to possess.

  The desire to kiss her was at times unbearable. I saw it on Saul’s face too but our gentleman’s agreement kept us from crossing that line. She was neither mine nor his. Every time she hugged one of us she would hug the other. We were as chaste as children, living without ownership or envy.

  Was this what life was like a hundred years ago? When lovers had chaperones and could not kiss in public? My God, I thought then, if I never have sex again, if I could just live like this in this constant repression of the urge, in which it grows and finds its way out, blossoming, not in acts of selfish possessiveness but in generosity, to two not one. If I could live like this, forever seeing the struggle in Saul’s face, to resist possessing her, to not betray me.

  The way she became then, in those weeks, some subtle liberation growing within her. She walked around in various states of un- and re-dressing, completely without embarrassment. She would pee with the door open, and read his books legs tucked to her knees on his sofa, with no panties on, giving us ample display of her peach-like buttocks and pouting pussy. She said coming off the antidepressants made her feel herself again. Saul thought it at times hilarious – a habit of the decadent aristocracy, the aristocracy always parade around half naked, he said. — My God, the Duchess is alive and living in my living room!

  You may not believe what follows but it is as factually true as that old cliché that declares joy harder to depict than conflict. All of our great narratives are of conflict and so joy goes undocumented and it is said that by documenting joy, we diminish and destroy it, but we found the opposite to be true. Our happiness was absolutely a product of her omnipresent camera. She would point it at me in the midst of – what? – sorting out my socks, and say: Action! And suddenly this banal chore turned into a performance. I would pull them on slowly as if I were Marlene Dietrich with silk stockings.

  We said ‘cut’ a lot. It became our way of saying: this is boring, let’s do something else. Saul no longer moaned or bitched at me, because he did not want to be caught in such a mood on camera. He woke and dressed before I even rose, as if ready for his close-up, Mr de Mille. Dot bought a hundred pounds’ worth of blank videotapes, and we got through half of them in a week. It even changed the world around us – one day we walked down Old Street arm in arm, all three, and because she held her camera at arm’s length filming us no one who passed said a thing. Some scary proles even jumped in our way, all smiles and waved to the lens, asking: — This for da telly, darlin?

  Our shadows reached long into the streets on those October evenings as we searched for things to film. We always ended up kicking about in the warehouse, off Old Street, the door long since booted in, brainstorming. Dot suggested we run around naked. — Cut! Saul shouted. — Too performance art. The whole nudity-as-truth thing is a modernist fallacy.

  I proposed that we could dance around to music. — Cut! he called out. — It’s been done before by that annoying socialist artist girl who danced in a shopping mall in Peckham, and besides, all the first MTV pop videos had pop bands dancing about in abandoned warehouses.

  No matter what ideas Dot and I came up with he found reasons to abandon them. — Cut! It’s no use. Stop trying to be interesting, he insisted. — You cannot compete with advertising. The only way to strike profundity is to aim one’s sights at the utterly banal and to miss completely.

  When he said things like that Dot shouted, — Stop, I have to record this. But by the time she got her camera ready he’d lost momentum and couldn’t pick up the thread again. Everything had been done before, he said, even the saying of it had been said before.

  I started to sense we’d get nothing done and that we were damaging her chance of an art degree. She had yet to learn that Saul’s encyclopaedic knowledge could be crippling. If it were not so then he would not still be have been with two wannabes, at age – what? – twenty-nine, thirty, hanging out in disused warehouses. The only way to be a true nihilist without being a hypocrite was to do absolutely nothing, he had often said. But when the camera was turned off we felt rather empty, melancholy.

  As per a typical night I shoplifted Pot Noodles on the way home and we added ketchup and chilli pepper to make up for the lack of sustenance by way of stimulation, then degreasing it all with boxes of sherry.

  — Oh ‘O’, she said to me, — I’ll never make art at this rate, I’m rubbish.

  Saul, suitably loosened, declared the answer was not to think of something arty to film, but to live more dangerously. He started on one of his rants about the Duchess.

  — She could not be contained, restrained. Her blood itself was in rebellion against the constriction of her veins. Likewise her gut, bladder and cunt. Every orifice puking, pissing in the face of convention.

  Dot was perplexed.

  — Who? Where? So I explained that Saul’s great muse was from New York, in the twenties the mistress of Duchamp, of most of the surrealists, in fact.

  — Nonsense! Saul shouted. — She was surrealism itself! Walking down Fifth Avenue wearing nothing but a trash can! A Chinese fan hanging from her anus. Did you know, he whispered drunkenly, — her talents at disguise were so accomplished she could go undetected even among her closest friends?! She dressed as a man, sporting a fulsome moustache, and wore a cucumber in her pants. She seduced rich men with homosexual tendencies, then blackmailed them, just for the hell of it.

  — No way! Dot said, but was transfixed.

  — That’s nothing. She was richer than Chrysler, some said, but lived in a hovel in Greenwich Village. She married an Austrian count and had him butchered, two days after the wedding.

  — That’s horrible!

  — Absolutely. She stole fur coats from Macy’s and handed them out to passing tramps. She was filling the streets with mink. She grew vegetables in human excrement and lived on nothing but champagne and opium! I have the book somewhere and if I ever find it you can read for yourself.

  Dot was enraptured. I left them alone so Saul could recount more of the gory deca
dence. In that moment, truth be told, I felt a little jealous for the sense of wonder she’d just discovered. From now on she would wake each day, her head bursting with surrealism and song.

  Back in my room, as I lay back, as if in déjà vu, I knew what would happen next and sure enough it did. I heard the stereo start up, then those ridiculous keyboards, that sounded like a kiddie’s toy version of Duran Duran meets a church organ – ‘Disparu’ by the Duchamps.

  ‘J’ai disparoo, tu as disparoo . . .’

  Our secret album and he was sharing it with her. I fought a small surge of jealousy, then conquered it, telling myself that yes – through her I was already, in many ways, reliving my conversion to the wondrous ways of Saul. I smiled to myself as the synthesisers wangled and the backwards audio samples of cats miaowing got louder and the she-man’s voice rose to an epic operatic flat note.

  ‘Nous avons deees – par – oooo!’

  There are markers, signs, points of no return in every relationship, tests to be endured and questions to be answered, a yes or no as to the future. In ancient times men went to a seer or oracle. And so Saul insisted we take a trip to Hackney to visit Edna – the exemplary living artwork. Funny, how he never said, — Let’s go buy some hash from Edna: His many paranoias and claims included that our phone had been tapped by MI5, due to his previous undisclosed subversive activities.

  As he readied himself in suitably contradictory attire, it fell on me to explain the deal to Dot. The more I told her the more absurd every word seemed.

  Edna lived in a high-rise on Hobbs Estate, which was mostly abandoned. She dealt mostly in hash, downers, hallucinogens and handed out spliffs like cups of tea. She held Saul in great esteem as they had some secret history. In her clouds of hashish smoke with her mystical wind-chime vinyls, she was surrounded, daily, by a harem of stoners who worshipped her every word. Saul believed Edna existed beyond the limits of the known world – on a good day.