Learning on the Job

Evan was convinced that working in a bar for a year had taught him nothing at all, but that was far from being the case. For an introspective type, not in the habit of following what was going on around himself, he'd picked up quite a lot. For example, he'd noticed how a customer left waiting for a minute or two at a crowded bar would invariably adopt a grim, otherworldly expression, as if contemplating an alternate reality in which everyone present was wired to explode in five minutes' time and didn't know it. As soon as you uttered the magic words 'what can I get you?' this expression would be replaced with solicitous friendliness, but that only made Evan more suspicious.

Another thing he'd learned was that almost no one knows anything about wine. For the first few months he'd been caught out again and again by expert sommeliers who would ask him for a 'dry white' or 'something from the Old World', but once he'd discovered that nine-times-out-of-ten all they wanted was a Sauvignon Blanc their power over him was broken. He had actually come to take pleasure in humiliating customers by reciting at length the names of lesser-known grape varities--Gros Manseng, Chasan, Malvasia Istriana--while they attempted to simulate an expression of thoughtfulness. When at last he finished with 'and we also have a Sauvignon Blanc' they would latch on to it gratefully, at which point he would ask if they wanted the Chilean, the New Zealand or the Australian Semillion blend. Not one of these wines had he ever tasted.

In the Dream (2)

I step into the bathroom of my parents’ house and find a chubby blonde woman wearing a black cocktail dress. She’s brushing her hair in front of the mirror and talking into a phone at the same time. She smiles at me. We start to have a conversation, but fortunately it’s the same one she’s having already, so there are no awkward pauses while she switches between partners. Her name is Jonathan Nice, and she’s a Hollywood agent. She represents a famous director who lives in the same building as me. Apparently, he’s terribly depressed; he spends hours every day scrubbing the floor in Sisyphean penance. I promise to check on him. Jonathan leaves for a party, exchanging a meaningful glance with me on her way out of the room. I’m fairly certain that the two of us are in love.

The Meat Job

The theme of Sara Solomon’s twenty-fourth birthday party was “Animals that are too ugly for TV”, which was one of the best ones she’d thought of in a while. Dressing up was a major component of Sara’s life—public and private—and her costume events were frequent and lavish, not to mention that they over-brimmed with the fashionable artists, musicians and media-types whose affections she worked so hard and so successfully to cultivate. It helped that she had money—the inherited fortune of a jewellery-store heiress—but there was no denying that she knew how to make contacts, and how to bring them together in all-night super novae of social energy.

Sara liked to joke about the morning-after complaints she received from uninvited neighbours: they never had a word to say about the noise, she insisted, it was the light of the spectacle that kept them from sleeping. The sort of light you’d expect at the end of the world, when all the countless components of the universe slip finally into alignment, revealing themselves to be the mechanisms of a crystalline machine set in motion aeons before and ticking each second towards a momentary state of total internal refraction. Light you couldn’t so much see as feel, and then only as the instantaneous erosion of your own body and its redistribution across the entirety of those dimensions formerly known as space and time. Good mother-fucking light.

Sara liked to talk in an overblown way. This wasn’t because she believed in the sublime; she just believed in talking. And playing. And having parties. She hadn’t read Plato, but she would have agreed with his assessment of poets; it was the metaphysics of compiling a good guest list on which the two of them diverged.

The “Animals that are too ugly for TV” party was held at Sara’s flat in South Kensington, itself a twenty-first birthday present from her parents, and the setting of a dozen prior soirees. Among the attendees were a fashion designer from Argentina and her English A&R-man boyfriend, a trainee surgeon from Botswana, a Canadian who made short films about cleaning products, the editor of a controversial vegan-lifestyle magazine and two members of a Romanian art-punk band that Sara had encountered the night before, each of whom had come dressed as the other. The remaining guests were mainly PR people, fashionistas and childhood friends of the hostess.

Tom Cobby was part of the latter group. He’d met Sara in sixth form and dated her for about three months, after which she’d flown off to Madrid for the summer and the relationship had dissipated. They were still on good terms, as was the case with all of her ex-boyfriends, but he’d only seen her once in the preceding year, and his attendance at the party was largely due to the nagging of various mutual friends. Although Tom was an affable and easygoing person, he was not a natural socialite, and he didn’t share Sara’s passion for the making and modelling of extravagant costumes. His outfit, which was based on a deep-sea anglerfish, was obviously a token effort, and way out of the running for first prize—it wasn’t even the best deep-sea anglerfish. That distinction went to Mark Sterling, who had managed to solve the problem of manufacturing a head-tendril strong enough to support a working light by using a clutch of LEDs, which were attached to a battery in the headpiece. Tom had compromised on this detail and painted a ping-pong ball fluorescent yellow; he was immediately impressed with his rival’s inventiveness.

“You’re like a vision of what I could achieve if I was taller, smarter and more hard-working,” was the first thing he said to Mark, when they met in the kitchen.

“You left out handsomer.”

Tom pointed out that when it came to impersonating ugly fish, good looks were a liability. Mark replied that he thought Tom had been speaking generally, then he finished stowing his spare Heinekens in the fridge—the one set aside specifically for drinks—and made way for a woman dressed as a post-op Droopy Dog.

The two of them got along pretty well on their own. It turned out that they were both connoisseurs of David Bowie films: The Man Who Fell to Earth, The Last Temptation of Christ, Labyrinth, The Hunger, The Prestige; they agreed that casting the Thin White Duke as Pontius Pilate was the greatest decision of Martin Scorsese’s career. But it wasn’t until Sara intervened that the real substance of their shared interests came to light. She was dressed as Sam, the Ugliest Dog in the World, a staggeringly repulsive animal that had enjoyed a brief period of Internet fame in the mid-2000s before succumbing to the cornucopia of medical conditions that had created its one-of-a-kind appearance in the first place. (The light that burns twice as brightly burns half as long, she repeatedly observed throughout the evening.) Her costume was remarkably authentic-looking, with dirty patches of fur scavenged from discarded soft toys, and little cellophane buboes filled with mayonnaise, which she would occasionally pop and excavate with a long-nailed finger.

“Hey guys,” she said, “don’t you both play the violin?” Seconds later she was dragged away by an insistent botfly larva to drink Flaming Sambucas out of the house’s one remaining clean receptacle, a ceramic egg cup modelled on Yogi Bear’s head. Had the larva been just fractionally quicker, the topic might never have come up, and The Meat Job might have passed Tom by without his ever knowing.

Anybody, Anyone

The patient’s delusion pertains to body-image. He imagines that he is not a mobile, self-contained organism but a collection of loosely associated organs and body parts, spreading out to fill the available space. Accordingly, he identifies himself with the rooms in which he spends most of his time, and exhibits additional peculiar behaviour when forced to move between them, namely episodes of narcolepsy, which last until his relocation in a familiar space.

During interviews, the patient is verbally responsive but fails to engage in normal displays of body language.

Strings of viscera cobweb the room. One eyeball hangs from the ceiling by its optic nerve; the other is nowhere in sight. “I made a mistake,” says the mouth, which obtrudes from a strip of unidentifiable tissue positioned above the door. “I thought that it would be easier like this.” “What would be easier?” “Finding myself. You probably think I’m joking.”

An Example of Something That Happened, Once

This, for example.

Sitting on a two-seater sofa with the girl with the freckle on her nose; two young people alone late at night, necks craning backwards over the low headrest, eyes on each other’s eyes.

Recounting in slow, trembling detail the plot of the movie Ring (the Japanese original), a movie that the girl with the freckle on her nose insists she will never watch.

Hearing your own voice with a clarity that seems uncanny--the sound of water flowing between rocks, somewhere high up; threads of crystal ringing in empty air. You and her and your wellspring of words alone in the electric half light.

Coming to the part of the movie that you love: the death of the hero. (This part is especially good because he is not the hero, and his death is pointless, unwarranted, unfair.)

Slowing down, lingering over morbid details.

Feeling tears in your eyes, as on the rare occasions when you say nice things about a friend behind his back.

Knowing that the girl with the freckle on her nose can see the tears.

Knowing that you will never be closer to her, or need to be.

Chronicles of Sexual Non-Awakening

“Have a happy, hepatitis-free New Year!”

Evan stopped in the doorway and turned back to the nurse, whose beaming face reminded him of the mischievous grandmother that TV had promised but never delivered. “Happy New Year,” he replied, doing his best to match her smile.

“I almost forgot,” she said, picking up a paper bag from the windowsill and proffering it like a packet of sweets, “do you need some condoms? Something for the weekend, sir?”

He shook his head; no TV grandmother had ever said that. “I think I’m alright,” he insisted, “it’s only Monday, after all.” Then he stepped into the corridor and made for the exit.

The temperature outside was a little below freezing, and the pavement in front of the Caldecot Centre was coated with ice. Evan had to pick his footholds carefully, hopping between islands of exposed concrete and baby-stepping across slippery patches, which kept him from thinking for a while. It was only when he came to Camberwell Road, where the ice had thawed under the onslaught of a million heavy footfalls, that he had the opportunity to redirect brain power to his higher faculties.

Good news, he thought, without feeling anything either way. HIV: Negative. Syphilis: Negative. Gonorrhoea: Negative. Chlamydia: Unknown. The nurse had paused before announcing this last result, as though she was about to say, “but I’m happy to report that you do have chlamydia, congratulations,” causing Evan a moment of anxiety. He’d fantasised at length about contracting HIV; how glorious and doomed it would make him appear; how mysterious. Rock stars and closeted matinee idols had HIV, not to mention porn actors and French philosophers. Syphilis was an enticing prospect, too, evoking Romantic poets and libertines, although it was presumably treatable with 21st century medicine. On the other hand, he had spared no thought for the less fashionable disorders. Ordinary people had chlamydia. Ugly people had chlamydia. It sounded like the sort of thing you’d catch as a result of a drunken shag in a nightclub car park; not at all what he was looking for in a sexually transmitted disease. “At least I know I don’t have gonorrhoea,” he said to himself, enjoying the sound of his voice as it articulated this exotic phrase.

Evan drifted into a charity shop, failing to register its name, and spent a few minutes browsing dog-eared paperbacks. It was strange how much the selection of books in a such a place could tell you about the local area, he thought. Here it was all popular crime fiction and conspiracy thrillers: Dan Brown, John Grisham, Ian Rankin. Back home in Bramhall, an affluent suburb of Manchester, he’d found books by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Stephen Hawking and Siegfried Sassoon. The things that poor people had read versus those that wealthy people pretended to have read. Or maybe he was being cynical.

The Pendulum Cypher

Eminent political blogger Davidoff Latour burst through the doorway, landing in a pile at the foot of the uncarpeted stairs. He quickly leapt to his feet and made a grab for the heavy revolver that he kept on the table, next to the black Olivetti rotary-dial telephone. It was gone. "Merde!" he cried, under his breath; then he slammed the front door shut behind himself and fastened the lock.

The 42-year-old mounted the stairs, taking three at a time. When he reached the landing he froze: the door to his study was leaning open. He never left the door to his study leaning open. "Merde," he cried again, quieter this time. Standing on tiptoe, he crept over to the doorway; then he reached into the room for the baseball bat that he kept by the door. It was a souvenir from his trip to New York, two years before, emblazoned with the words "NY Yankees." This time, he found it. He hoisted the bat aloft and stormed into his office, ready to take a swing at anyone who appeared before him. There was no one there.

Latour straightened up, allowing the bat to fall by his side. Then he heard a click.

"Don't move," said a hoarse voice, coming from behind him. "The room is wired with explosive devices."

There was a shiny silver coffee pot sitting on the desk, and in it Latour was able to make out the distorted reflection of a huge, sinister figure, easily seven feet tall, with red piercing eyes. "Who are you?" he demanded, trying to cover the fear in his voice with manly bluster.

"Who I am is not important," hissed the figure, whose accent seemed familiar yet strange. "What matters is what I want from you. A very small thing. No problem." The blogger watched the reflection as it lit a match and then blew it out immediately. Then it spoke again. "You are in possession of a certain artifact that I seek to obtain. A relic from another age."

Latour began to sweat coldly. "You mean?"

"Yes," said the figure. "I mean." A gun appeared in the reflection's hand. "Give it to me. Now."

"It's in my safe," squeaked Latour.

"Get it." The gun grew larger.

Two days later, the body of eminent political blogger Davidoff Latour was pulled out of a river in a Paris suburb. There was a bullet hole in the middle of his forehead. He was 42-years old.

That was when I received the call.

It has now been several hours since I woke to find myself naked in an unfamiliar room, handcuffed to a lifesize wax model of Benito Mussolini. So far, I have been unable to establish the sequence of events that brought me to this place; I thought for a while that I might have been the victim of an elaborate practical joke, but who among my acquaintances could have executed it? Certainly not my colleagues at the office; they are far too sober and respectable. Nor could it have been my only surviving family member, cousin John, since he is out of the country at present, doing important work for the government. That leaves only my landlady, Mrs Punt, and she is a septuagenarian with macular degeneration. Of course, she has a fiery spirit, but I believe that the physical work of transporting me from my room to this mysterious place (without alerting me to my plight) is beyond her, and she hates to employ labourers for any but the most essential tasks. 'If it broke, then it doesn't deserve to be fixed,' as she likes to say. I think that she has misunderstood natural selection; still, she keeps the rent low, as, by another quirk of her character, she refuses to recognise the concept of inflation.

Dream the in (slightly wrong)

Voluptuous invisible meteorites located demonstrate distracted modesty interprets genitals difficult concentrate murderous volcanoes appealing finally enormous refugees suddenly Ghostbusters predator samurai predator unconscious fixation sitting classroom classroom L-shaped shorter person teaching lesson around corner sitting naked woman lesson Percy Bysshe Shelley although about Percy Bysshe Shelley little naked woman talking flirting mildly after occurs duvet preserve gesture come-on snuggles massage very teacher saying begins spaceships appear bearing intent also prospect learning Percy Bysshe Shelley prospect having naked woman confides classroom across city tumbling around hotel worried about hotel before fighting Arctic cock-blocked ‘80s sci-fi movies in the dream I am in a the is and I am at the far end of the leg the the is out of the I am not on a but on my bed and next to me on the bed is a she is and the is on I would like to learn and to the that I know I am the keeps to me and a while it to me that I should share my with her so that she can her but she this as a she up next to me and starts to my which makes it to on what the is at some point the world to end or in the sky down on us with there are the of seems less and less the of sex with the more and more so she in me that she is a porn star we leave the and rush the which is down us in search of a good I am the cost of the room we find a but there is an queue of at the front desk we can check in we are a in the with the aid of a team of the wins I have been by my with.

In the Dream

In the dream, I am sitting in a classroom. The classroom is L-shaped, and I am located at the far end of the shorter leg; the person teaching the lesson is out of sight around the corner. I am sitting not on a chair but on my bed, and next to me, also on the bed, is a naked woman. She is young and voluptuous.

The lesson is on Percy Bysshe Shelley. Although I would like to learn about Percy Bysshe Shelley, and to demonstrate the little that I already know, I am distracted. The naked woman keeps talking to me and flirting mildly. After a while it occurs to me that I should share my duvet with her, so that she can preserve her modesty, but she interprets this gesture as a come-on. She snuggles up next to me and starts to massage my genitals, which makes it very difficult to concentrate on what the invisible teacher is saying.

At some point, the world begins to end. Spaceships or meteorites appear in the sky, bearing down on us with murderous intent. There are also volcanoes. The prospect of learning about Percy Bysshe Shelley seems less and less appealing, the prospect of having sex with the naked woman more and more so. She confides in me that she is a porn star. We leave the classroom and rush across the city, which is tumbling down around us, in search of a good hotel. I am worried about the cost of the room.

Finally, we find a hotel, but there is an enormous queue of refugees at the front desk. Before we can check in, we are suddenly Ghostbusters, fighting a predator in the Arctic with the aid of a team of samurai. The predator wins: I have been cock-blocked by my unconscious fixation with '80s sci-fi movies.

Postcards from the Edge of Sense

Bingo Estevez sat in a wicker chair in his lounge, sucking lemon juice from the tip of his right-hand ring finger and thinking unhappily of nothing. Music played on the hifi behind him—a sort of room-temperature salsa, which registered on his consciousness only as a faint perturbation of the otherwise stale atmosphere, like the ripples of an insect’s footsteps in a stagnant pool. He reached down his finger into the glass that lay perched on his lap, amid the folds of his dressing gown, and attempted to squeeze a little more fluid from the emaciated lemon segment inside it. The results were unsatisfactory.

“I’ve been had, I’ve been had,” he sang sotto voce, improvising a jazzy melody; “never thought I’d feel so bad, never thought I’d feel so bad.”

Across from Bingo, buried in an old red beanbag whose contents had long since adhered into a shape something like the maw of a volcano, Malcolm Détente stirred from his laptop trance. He reached out for his can of Red Stripe and, finding it empty, took to his feet.

“Anybody want another drink?” he stammered, swaying slightly in an imagined breeze. There was no response from either Bingo or Steptoe Grieg, who lay sprawled on a small leather sofa, his hands held up in the air, ready to catch any object that might materialise in the space above him and come crashing down on his head. “Fine,” grunted Malcolm.

“I’ll have another G&T, if you’re up,” said Bingo, his voice oddly plaintive, his eyes closed tightly shut.

“Yeah, grab me another can,” added Steptoe.

Malcolm took Bingo’s glass and fell sideways out of the room, as though the entire structure had suddenly tipped over, and he was the only thing not to have been nailed down.

“Do you think,” intoned Steptoe, apparently addressing some entity much grander than his diffuse friend, “that when we’re all great successes, supping champagne with publishers and fashion designers—”

“And beautiful socialite ladies,” added Bingo.

“Yeah, right, them too. Do you think that we’ll look back on these days of relative squalor and feel some sort of pang…a deep longing for the bohemian ways of our youth?”

Bingo waited for a moment before answering, as though he was actually thinking about what he was going to say. “Yes, I suppose we will. But then we’ll just buy a bunch of caftans and berets and threadbare faux-Persian rugs and we’ll keep doing what we were doing before in a slightly different setting.” He raised his glass to his lips, by way of rhetorical punctuation, then realised that it was no longer in his possession.

“Yeah, that’s exactly how it’ll be,” agreed Steptoe, lowering one of his arms to trace with finger and thumb the broad contour of a smile. “Hmm.”

Malcolm returned with a fresh G&T and two cans of Red Stripe, one of which he slung at the upraised hands of Steptoe, who unfortunately failed to react in time; it struck him neatly in the groin, causing him to do an involuntary crunch. “Whimper,” he said, to his companions’ amusement.

This Was Going to Be about a Hermaphrodite Prostitute in 1950s Paris, but as It Turns out I Don't Know Anything about That

Simone withdrew her head from the American’s lap and spat his semen into the grimy tumbler she’d appropriated for the purpose, half-submerging the cigarette butt lying at the bottom of the glass. The butt lay like a dismembered tree trunk in a pool of sour milk; she stared at it for a moment, imagining perhaps that it was part of some surrealist nature scene—the centrepiece in a forest of upright cigarettes, all burned down to different heights, particles of ash swarming in the air like a colony of bats gone suddenly deaf—then turned her head towards me and smiled.

“You want to see?” she asked, proffering her newfound objet d’art.

I shook my head. “I can see it already.”

“Isn’t it beautiful?”

“Oh yes, and original, too. I don’t know where you get your ideas.”

She laughed and turned back to the American. “You make art with your whole body.”

He had a fresh cigarette in his mouth and was on the point of lighting it, but he paused and made a show of taking a close look, carefully adjusting the angle of his thick-rimmed spectacles. “You know what? You might just have something there,” he said, affecting a professorial tone. “And to think I’ve been wasting my time with poetry.” His mouth stretched in a nervous smile, which so delighted Simone that she decided to dart forward and kiss it, nearly knocking him off his chair. “Honey,” he said, “you ought to be more careful.”

“I am careful,” she protested, rising to her feet and setting the glass down on the bedside table. “I didn’t hurt you; I never hurt anyone.” With that she plucked the unlit cigarette from his mouth and slipped it into her own, turned, covered in one theatrical step the space between herself and the bed on which I was sitting, and leaned over me. For a moment I was aware of nothing but the presence of two large, impassive eyes—yellow-green irises ringed with deep blue, one pupil fractionally larger than the other—and the faint scent of sweat. “Une allumette, monsieur,” she mumbled through the corner of her mouth. Her breath was sweet.

I reached inside my jacket and pulled out a book of matches, snapped one off and lit it; when I held it up to her face she straightened, moving out of reach. “Do you want a light or what?” I demanded, trying to sound indignant.

“I said I want a match.”

“Well, here it is.” I waved the offending object in the air for emphasis, immediately extinguishing it. Simone laughed and the cigarette fell to the floor.

My Father Was a Travelling Salesman

My father was a travelling salesman. That is what he told me. I cannot remember him ever making a sale, but it is true that he and I travelled far and wide during the not many years that I was with him. I was only a child, and I did not understand much of what he did.

My father was not a tall man, so when we entered a new town he would climb up on to a roof in order to establish himself in the minds of the populace. Sometimes the owner of the roof would shout for him to come down, or even throw rocks, but he would not dismount until he was certain that everyone had registered his appearance. Once he was certain, he would spring off like a gazelle and hit the ground running, sending up clouds of dust that choked many passers-by. I would have to chase after him, because he forgot himself when he was running, and it was possible that he would keep going for hours. It was my job to call out to him, so that he would eventually come to his senses.

After that, the two of us would retrace our steps and set up a stall in the town square. I had the honour of working on the stall, attempting to sell the handicrafts that my father made from the refuse that we picked up on the roads between towns. He would construct little angels with beer cans for bodies and cigarette butts for arms, ‘rain slippers’ from punctured footballs, and various other paraphernalia. My favourite thing he made was a knight’s shield, which consisted of a discarded hubcap with a leather strap for a handle. I begged him to let me keep it, but he sold it to a little blind boy for half a dollar. As soon as my father had turned his back I kicked the blind boy in the leg, but I did not take the shield back--even then, I respected the sanctity of a completed transaction. Also, my father would have seen me carrying the shield and punished me.

Our life as travelling salesmen was hard, but we were lucky enough to meet many kind people, who sheltered us and gave us food. I still remember a fat woman who let us stay in her house during the rains. She called me ‘Onion’, because my smell made her eyes water, and she let me sleep on a rug in the corner with her dogs. She loved the dogs very much, so I knew that she loved me, too. My father shared her bed, which looked big and comfortable, but the two of them did not get much sleep--they spent all night groaning and moving around. Eventually, I got up to ask what was the matter, but my father slapped my face and made me go back to the corner. When I got there, I found that one of the dogs had died, and the other one was eating it. I was curious, so I took a bite, and just then the woman looked over to me and screamed. My father and I had to flee from that place, and I don’t think he ever forgave me for leaving the beer-can angels behind.

The Mortification of Saint Simone

“I am Simone Saint,” I say, holding my passport open beside my face so that the man at border control can inspect the likeness. I may be keeping a low profile on this trip, but there’s no disguising bone structure like mine, and my dark inward-sloping eyebrows give me a distinctively mischievous look, useful for playing bad girls and dominatrices—my specialties, as it happens. He leans forward and plucks the passport from my hand, which strikes me as rather rude, particularly as this is my first visit to his green and supposedly pleasant land, as the great British poet William Blake would have it. I’m basically an Anglophile, you know, and I was expecting a warmer reception, but apparently the people here don’t recognize a rising star of the adult entertainment industry when they see one. I’ll soon put that right.

After subjecting my documents to a perfunctory examination, the man hands them back with a sullen, “Thank you, madam.” I reward his disobedience with a wink of Palinesque magnitude, which prompts him to lower his eyes in shame; a fitting gesture in the presence of a royal personage like myself. Last year I received the Adult Film Institute’s coveted “Princess of Porn” award, and I still have the diamante tiara—its centerpiece a bejeweled upstanding phallus—to prove it, although AFI rules dictate that I return the item within the next few months, and second terms are unheard of. No matter; I am soon to be Queen, and I intend to make that an appointment for life, or at least until my body passes beyond the reach of cosmetic surgery.

I proceed into the baggage area and retrieve my single small bag. Since I conduct most of my business au naturel, I’m able to travel light; were it not for my bibliomania I’d probably get by with carry-on alone. As it is, I’m invariably accompanied by a selection of fine reading matter, which enables me to work on the improvement of my mind during any passages of downtime that might arise. I transfer the bag from one hand to the other, enjoying the reassuring heft of my portable library, which today includes Philip Absolon’s Cracking the Chastity Belt: Illicit Sexual Practices in Medieval Europe, Celia Steven’s Plato and the Whore, and a collection of anonymous pornographic stories from the early 20th century called Tender Flights. Being a renaissance woman, I’ve undertaken to write a series of erotic fictions for the excellent Throat Magazine, so I’m trying to absorb all the literary smut I can get my hands on; the life of a researcher is painstaking and arduous.

All of which brings me, more or less, to the point: what am I, a respectable porn starlet—that demeaning suffix is soon to be severed once and for all!—from Flatbush, Ohio, doing in a big bad city like London? What could a den of iniquity like this possibly have to offer an honest clean-limbed girl like me? Well, I’m here on business. Movie business. Specifically, I’m here to cast my next film, for which I will be making the transition from performer to writer-director-producer-auteur; from sex puppet to sex puppeteer. My vision is awesome, albeit somewhat elusive: an examination of sexuality across boundaries of geography, culture, class; multiple narrative strands, never quite converging—too easy—but pulling close and resonating in thematic sympathy; a polyglot cast, drawn not from the ranks of my preening pumped-up peers but from all walks of life. I will fill the screen with artists, junkies, bohemians, homemakers and homeless, possessors and dispossessed, plus maybe an aristocrat or two, if I can find any who aren’t over-exposed already, thanks to our celebrity-fixated tabloid culture.

I even thought of inviting my parents to participate, but decided against it; aspiring Freudians everywhere would have seized the chance to besmirch my credentials, writing me up as just another over-reaching Electra. On the contrary, I only want to raise consciousness of the many taboos that still obtain, despite the portentous moralizing of the governing class, whose regular jeremiads regarding our gradual slide down the mountain of virtue into the valley of debauchery—on the toboggan of permissiveness, no doubt—encourage us to cultivate a psychic atmosphere of permanent sexual guilt. “No to guilt!” A political campaign slogan in the making. But first things first; I must be Ozu before I am Obama.

What Happens in Houses Stays in Houses

The fat girl has fallen down the stairs and won’t get up, so the three of us (N, R and I) are stuck on the first-floor landing, chatting among ourselves and observing the efforts of the well-wishers below.

“What did you talk about last time you were trapped somewhere by a fat girl?” asks N.

I have no idea what the answer to this question is, so I say, “I think I talked about pro wrestling. You know how in the WWF, or the WWE as it’s now known, they always exaggerate the wrestlers’ heights by about two inches?”

N raises his eyebrows and brings a hand to his thinly bearded chin, preparing to be interested. R appears not to be listening.

“Well, Ken Shamrock is listed in the WWE as being 6’1”, but I read his authorised biography and it says that he’s 5’11”. So I did some checking around and it turns out that they do this with all the wrestlers.”

“Really?” gasps N, opening his eyes wide in astonishment.

“Absolutely. And it’s so senseless: who cares if some huge beefcake of a man is 6’10” and 400lbs instead of 7’ and 420lbs? Do they really think that’s significantly more impressive?”

“It’s a slippery slope, too,” muses N, nodding sadly. “Right now these wrestling people are just exaggerating heights, but a year from now they could be falsifying their names and identities altogether. And what next? Choreographing the matches in advance? It’s unthinkable.”

“Unthinkable,” I reply.

At that moment the fat girl wails loudly and informs everyone within earshot that her ankle is broken. Once they’ve been informed to her satisfaction she informs them again.

“She wouldn’t have broken her ankle if she hadn’t fallen down the stairs,” observes R. “And she wouldn’t have fallen down the stairs if she wasn’t drunk and fat.” He raises a can of Strongbow to his lips and pauses, his eyes staring off at some point beyond the exterior wall, beyond space itself, perhaps. “It’s so simple,” he whispers.

Then he drinks.

For a few moments we stand in silence, solemnly absorbing the ambient noise of the party: in the next room people are shouting and someone is playing bad dance music at high volume. Then I take in a deep breath and say, “I’ve been standing at the top of these stairs with you gentlemen for what seems like a long time now, and I can assure you that I have never had a more profound and moving experience in my whole life.”

“Thanks,” says N.

“Thanks,” says R.

“I really mean it. That fat girl,” I gesture at the fat girl, “in her simple act of falling down the stairs and refusing to get up, has brought the three of us together in a way that I’d never thought possible. I feel as though we’re brothers, lovers, best friends forever; I feel such a profound sense of kinship with you guys that—”

A man passes through our triangle, attempting to get to the floor below. “No entry, mate,” says R. “The fat girl fell down the stairs.”

“—as I was saying,” I continue, “I’m sick to death of the pair of you, and I only wish that it was you who’d fallen down the stairs; fallen down the stairs and broken your stupid necks.”

“Yes, yes,” intones N, “but the fact is that it wasn’t us, it was the fat girl. The fat girl fell down the stairs and no one else, so just shut up and stop whining.”

A well-wisher, having examined the fat girl’s broken ankle for several minutes, declares it unbroken. She strenuously disagrees. R calls out, “Walk it off!” and several other well-wishers look up at him; not all of them seem disapproving. R smiles slyly and takes another swig of Strongbow.

“Why did we ever come here?” wails N. “We should have foreseen this; we should have foreseen that the fat girl would fall down the stairs.”

“How could we?” I reply. “The fat girl is a mysterious entity; her actions are impossible to predict, or even to understand.”

“Still,” says N, “we should have been prepared. We should have brought equipment of some kind.”

“If we had pickaxes we could break her up, no problem,” observes R. “Or even just hammers.”

“I think I saw a hammer in the bathroom,” I say.

No one moves.

“Will one hammer be enough?” asks N.

“The important question is: who’s going to wield it?” counters R.

“Well,” I say, “it was your idea.”

R shakes his head vigorously. “My idea was for all of us to have a go at her. If there’s only one hammer it’s no good.”

“Why the hell not?”

“Because if there’s only one hammer then only one person is incriminated; the other two could turn him in to save themselves.” R glares at N and me in turn, making plain his distrust.

“Not necessarily,” says N. “We could all take turns using the hammer; then we’d all be equally guilty.”

“Yeah, but what if she only takes one blow?”

“The fat girl?” I guffaw.

“She could survive a direct hit from a mortar,” says N.

“She could swallow a Sherman tank in her sleep.”

“What if she only takes one blow,” continues R, choosing to ignore us, “and then there’s me with a bloody hammer in my hand, trying to explain to the police why I bludgeoned the fat girl to death while the two of you point at me behind my back and pull guilty faces?”

“Don’t be paranoid. You know we’d never do a thing like that,” says N.

“How do you pull a guilty face?” I ask.

Glamorous American Rules

(For Chris Green. Happy birthday, captain!)

“Chris!”

I turn in the direction of the voice and see a skinny blonde girl carrying a bundle of rags. She staggers over and as she gets close I notice that her eyes are red from crying.

“Where are you going?” she demands, her brow puckering in a singularly unattractive way.

“I’m going back to college,” I reply. She’s quite a bit shorter than me and as I look her in the face my aviators begin to slip off my nose. I try to restore them by jerking my head back but they go flying on to the floor anyway, breaking apart on the hard faux-marble surface.

The demise of my shades doesn‘t even faze her. “But what about us?” she asks. “You said we were going to stay together. You said I was special.”

I take a breath. I don’t want to tell this girl that I have no idea who she is; that would be rude. Plus judging from her demeanour she’d probably freak out and cause a major scene. So I say, “Hey look, babe, we had fun, right? Yeah? But now it’s time to get back to…whatever we were doing before and just say, like, ‘I had a great time but now vacation’s over and I have to get back to my regular day-to-day life and responsibilities and not worry about who did what and who said what under the influence of whatever, you know, substances and so forth.’ Playtime’s over. Back to class. You know?” I smile reassuringly and try to remember what gate my flight is departing from in case I have to make a run for it.

She doesn’t look convinced. “Whatever we were doing before?” she screeches.

I glance around the airport concourse; people are already looking at us strangely. “Yeah, babe, sure. Try to be cool.” I reach out tentatively and pat her shoulder.

“Don’t fucking touch me, prick,” she hisses, recoiling from me.

“Hey, hey, hey. Take it easy.” I’m beginning to freak out myself so I grab a handful of diazepam tablets from my coat pocket and dry-swallow them. They taste bitter; must have mingled with the coke I left in there last night.

At that moment my dealer, Justin, walks through the main entrance. “Hey, Justin!” I shout, desperate to escape my predicament. For a moment he doesn’t seem to recognise me but then his face lights up and he ambles over.

“Hey, Chris. How’s it going?” We high-five and he slaps my ass. “You heading back to college?”

I nod. “You?”

“Yeah.”

Out of the corner of my eye I can see that the crazy blonde girl is standing open-mouthed by my side, apparently too shocked to speak. I try to press the advantage. “So, man, you got any more coke on you?”

Justin looks at me funny. “Dude, this is an airport.”

“Yeah, so?”

“I can’t be bringing illegal substances into an airport.”

“Look at me, you bastard!” whispers the crazy blonde girl. I ignore her.

“So you don’t have anything? Because I could really do with a pick-me-up.”

“Dude, this is an airport.”

“Yeah, yeah. Whatever. What about grass?”

Justin grunts and shakes his head, then he turns to the crazy blonde girl and smiles. “Hey, I’m Justin.”

“Angelique,” she says, barely controlling her anger.

“So are you two, like, an item or what?” Justin was never good at judging the emotional temperature of a situation.

“No,” I say.

“Yes,” she says.

“No,” I repeat, drawing the word out good and long.

“This says otherwise, bastard.” She holds up the bundle of rags and shakes it vigorously; a timorous crying sound comes from within.

“What the fuck do you have in there?” hisses Justin, glancing around nervously.

A look of utter malevolence overtakes her face; she draws herself up to her full height (about 5’5”) and draws in a deep breath. “What I have in here,” she says, looking me dead in the eyes, “is your incestuous lovechild.”

Some people walk by. I realise that my mouth is open. “Lovechild?” I croak.

“Incestuous?” says Justin.

Angelique nods. She twirls the bundle around her head, laughing like a madwoman. After a few moments Justin starts laughing too.

“Dude, I’d tell you to do the honourable thing but I don’t even know what that is in this case,” he says, punching me in the arm. “Anyway, I have to jet. See you next summer!” He slaps my ass again and then he’s gone.

I grab Angelique by the shoulders and try to talk some sense into her. “Look, this is a mistake,” I say. “I don’t know who you are but I don’t have any sisters and my mom’s been dead for seven years. I do not have an incestuous lovechild.”

She smiles maniacally and kisses me on the lips. This time I recoil. “Don’t play games with me, baby. You have one sister, at least, and I’m her.”

“I never even saw you before.”

“Fuck off!”

“No, I’m totally serious. I didn’t even know your name until you told Justin.”

This seems to shake her up. “But you said…last night you said…”

“Last night, honey, I was passed-out on the floor of a hotel bathroom for 12 hours.” I reach into my luggage and retrieve my camcorder. “And I have the footage to prove it.”

“Passed-out?” She starts to cry again. “But you seemed so…responsive.”

TO BE CONTINUED

The Following Statement Is False. The Previous Statement Is True.

A story about Katherine Coleman that contains the words “wall,” “building,” “Michael Jackson,” “whimsical,” “happy,” “bright,” mention of her being a plumber and her name. It can only be 2 paragraphs long (6 sentences each).

Treacle Toffee Month

Katherine Coleman pressed her hands against the wall and pushed until her legs began to tremble and her palms to bleed. Passers-by looked on in confusion. The building would not budge. “Hell!” she cried, “how am I going to bring Michael Jackson back from the dead if I can’t even topple a small family restaurant?” She straightened up and stretched her aching muscles. “Another whimsical project that I’ll never get off the ground.”

Katherine had not been happy for a long time; not since childhood, in fact. In school she had been regarded as a very bright pupil, and her teachers had spoiled her, ultimately setting her on a path of wastage and fecklessness. Now she was 32 years old and a professional plumber, though not a good one. “I should have gone to college,” she whined. “I should have studied law, like I always said I would.” Katherine hung her head and began to sob, quietly at first, then louder and louder until she was practically bawling in the street, so that the proprietor of the restaurant, an elderly Greek man with a fine waxed moustache, was obliged to come out and comfort her; despite his best efforts, she would not stop, and he eventually went back inside to call the police, thinking that she was an escaped mental patient or something, since there was a mental institute not far from there and it was not unheard of for its inhabitants to wander off the property and attack people, although the last incident of that kind had occurred all the way back in 1977, long before the Greek restaurant proprietor had even moved to the country; back then he was still living in his mother’s apartment in Paris with his German lover Josef, who had been the great love of his life, when he came to think about it.

Taxicab Explication of Aboriginal Genital-Mutilation Rituals

Hear me, yes, for tonight I have supped on many potent and flavoursome libations; mixed grape and grain and sugar-beet molasses until the air around grew thick as warm water by night, and vortices of unseen origin propelled my body from floor to ceiling, spinning themselves to nothing at velocities no speedometer could ever apprehend. I have watched coloured lights, once hung in state, descend and dance in frenzied counterpoint some atavistic ritual whose function I could not hope to fathom, and felt my head dance with them; a frantic, lilting dance that reminds me of the word “calypso,” although I don’t really know what the word “calypso” denotes. (Note to sober self: look up the word “calypso.”)

I have been sick once, on the sparkling heels of a fat-faced girl with lethal-looking hair and lips painted the bloody purple of a hanged man’s glans. I enjoyed being sick on her, and would happily make her my target a second time, but I doubt that the opportunity will arise now that she is on her guard. I have fought off the persistent advances of an oafish, drunken student and cast myself before a handsome doctor wearing a beanie, and been judged acceptable, and I have boarded the taxi that will take us back to his friend’s place where we will make small talk for a while and then fuck, probably clumsily, on a sofa or a sofa-bed or (praise be for small mercies!) a real actual bed with mattress, sheets and pillows such as will afford a measure of comfort commensurate with the standard of living to which I have become accustomed in my 22 years of riding this inscrutable planet through one effortless, invisible rotation after another.

I have done all of this and I have been neither perplexed nor aggrieved at any point; not until the moment when the skinny white boy who makes up the fourth wheel of our proud, night-coursing triumvirate, and who is evidently the fated plaything of our host-to-be, commenced rattling on about a subject apparently close to his heart, namely male-genital mutilation.

“There’s an amazing diversity of techniques and practices to be observed across the world, even today,” he declaims, waving a single extended finger in the air as though in unconscious phallic tribute. “For example, the Aborigines—that’s ‘Aborigines’ with a capital ‘A;’ ‘aborigines’ with a small ‘a’ means simply the native inhabitants of a given region—the Aborigines perform both the traditional circumcision and also a procedure called a ‘subincision,’ in which the penis is split from head to base along the urethra.”

“Jesus,” says the handsome doctor, whose name, I think, is Saami; he turns to me with a pained expression on his face and I do my best to look sympathetic.

“Apparently, the shedding of blood that occurs during the procedure is considered to represent a male form of menstruation; it’s a rare case of genital mutilation that, far from being misogynistic, is actually rooted in a sympathetic attitude to womanhood.”

As the only lady present, I feel obliged to respond to this observation. “Well, I’m sure Valerie Solanas would have approved, but I’m quite happy for men to keep their genitals intact.” I let my hand fall on Saami’s thigh and see his eyebrows climb a couple of centimetres.

The white boy continues, oblivious to everything but his own voice. “It’s actually caught on as a form of voluntary genital modification in the West. Men choose to have their penises split open, and in some cases completely bifurcated, as an expression of their individuality and self-possession. It’s fascinating.”

“Yes, isn’t it.” I smile sweetly and he seems to get the idea; he turns his attention to the window and watches the night crawl by.

There is silence in the vehicle for a while, not counting the constant hissing of water sent spraying by the tyres, the chatter of passing pedestrians, the driver’s soft and wilfully tuneless humming. It’s so close to peaceful that I find myself nodding off with my head on Saami’s shoulder; he looks down and we both smile like people who’ve known and been close to each other for more than an hour, which is easy enough to do as long as you regard all your sexual partners as essentially interchangeable. This is a bad habit of mine that comes in handy so frequently that I’m loathe to kick it. I close my eyes and try to focus on the humming from the front seat, it having occurred to me that any series of notes is technically a tune, and that enjoyment is a simple matter of deciphering the patterns (intentional or otherwise). I hear snatches of “Frère Jacques,” “Sweet Child of Mine” and something classical they used to play in school assemblies. Then we arrive.

The fat girl has fallen down the stairs

and won’t get up, so we’re stuck on the first floor, chatting and idly observing the efforts of the well-wishers below. “What did you talk about last time you were stuck somewhere?” asks N. I don’t know the answer to this question, so I say “did you know that pro wrestlers always exaggerate their height by about two inches? It’s true. But what’s the point?” The fat girl wails and informs us that her ankle is broken. R points out that “she wouldn’t have broken her ankle if she hadn’t fallen down the stairs. And she wouldn’t have fallen down the stairs if she wasn’t drunk and fat. It’s simple.” Then he takes a swig of Strongbow. Someone tells the fat girl that her ankle definitely isn’t broken, and we’re happy to accept this diagnosis, if only to spite her. Someone else helps her up and takes her to a bedroom to rest, to "let the bones heal," clearing the way for our descent at last. We celebrate this victory by staying just where we are.

Shake Hands with the Zeitgeist

I've posted before about the strange trend for literary mash-ups that's arisen recently. God knows if it'll last; seems pretty flash-in-the-pan to me, surely the Internet can provide infinitely more of the same without the expense and the inconvenience of page turning (once every 700 words!). Still, I'm not averse to a bit of prospecting. Thus, I present my contribution to this field of opportunistic hackery:

Imperial March
A Study of Provincial Life in the Mid Rim

Miss Brooka had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress. Her hand and wrist were so finely formed that she could wear sleeves not less bare of style than those in which Mon Mothma had appeared before the Senate; and her profile as well as her stature and bearing seemed to gain the more dignity from her plain garments, which by the side of provincial fashion gave her the impressiveness of a fine quotation from the Collected Works of Master Yoda. She was usually spoken of as being remarkably strong in the Force, but with the addition that her sister Celiara had a higher midi-chlorian count. Nevertheless, Celiara wore scarcely more trimmings, and it was only to close observers that her dress differed from her sister’s and had a shade of coquetry in its arrangements; for Miss Brooka’s plain dressing was due to mixed conditions, in most of which her sister shared. The pride of being Jedis had something to do with it: the Brooka connexions, though not exactly aristocratic, were unquestionably "good"; if you inquired backward for a generation or two, you would not find any droid-fixing or pod-racing forefathers—anything lower than an admiral or Jedi master.


There you have it; easy as fucking a pie. Or so I imagine.