Twentysix Read online

  Outside, in the street, he presses a white pill into my mouth and kisses me again, and I wash it down with a mixture of his boozy spittle and mine. ‘Wanna go to a party?’ he asks, and soon we are transported into a house nearby, where about a dozen people are sitting drinking, listening to The Clash. He tells me his name is Niall. His handsome face is mischief. We have some MDMA in the bathroom and kiss some more, before returning to the lounge, where he collapses on the sofa and sinks into a deep sleep. I decide to stay. My head is packed with energy and possibility. My mind is a staircase up which I am frantically running. I talk and dance the whole night through with these strangers who share with me their drugs and their music and their laughter; and just before sunrise Niall stirs and stands and takes me by the hand and leads me out into the sun-sugared streets of morning like a guardian angel. Birds are singing all around us, their notes dipping and soaring like bubbles popping. I know what hands are for and I’d like to help myself. This line goes round and round in my disconnected head as he leads me by the hand to a squat in Hackney, where he warms up some lentil soup which we share before going to his room. It is a high-ceilinged whitewashed room. The floor is littered with clothes, a mattress in one corner, stacks of records all around, piles of books, a Lloyd Loom chair. A mannequin sprayed silver stands by the window, its neck laden with gold chains, on its head a purple beehive wig. When he is naked I notice something I had not seen in the club. Now, in the grey daylight that breaks through the white sheet hung up against the window, I can see the letters standing out in legible scars across his hairless chest. D-E-N-I-A-L. For the briefest moment I love this wounded man/boy, in whose eyes I see the recognisable burn of drugs and sex and hunger. He shines with a lost need, a lonely greedy fucked-up cock-sure need and we fall against each other and onto that grimy mattress. We lie, head to toe, feeding on each other’s cocks. I occupy every last space available for this experience, I inhabit this feeling of pleasure, wanting it never to end. And that word, DENIAL, plays across the black expanse of my consciousness, repeats and repeats, like a broken record, and I want to know what it means, why it is there, who did it to him, or did he do it to himself? The letters are sharp and clear, rising like Braille, seeming to crave touch to be complete. Too steady to have been done by his own hand, perhaps. I want to ask him, but I don’t. Instead, I let the tension gather up and disperse into the unravelled moment of my orgasm, let the hot cum he has just shot across my neck and chest turn to cold water and run down to the dirty sheets before I say, ‘Have you got a towel, mate?’

  After wiping ourselves down, we fall into a spoon, him inside the naked Z of my folded body, and I can feel the need for sleep enter my muscles. I think about what it takes to cut words into skin, what it feels like, the warm fluid oozing, the intense pain, the gathering and releasing of the body’s forces, the chaos inside that translates into those six skinwhite letters. I wonder what it must be like to share your life with a man like that, realising – with a deep deep sadness made worse by the drugs and lack of sleep – that it wouldn’t, couldn’t, make my loneliness diminish or my loss decrease.

  Is it speech that holds the truth, or silence? Is it through words that I will know you, or through grunts, sighs, gasps and mews? I tried to hold you in my hands, but you were too big, too elusive. I tried to keep a grip on things, but love got in the way.

  Your body, to me, was like an altar and my piety knew no bounds. I drank your piss like Holy wine, and believed, and believed, and believed.

  Your body, to me, was like a miracle, to be awed by again and again. I said your name in my waking hours like a prayer, and wished more than anything that things could have been different.

  If my body means anything to you now, it is only in dreams, like a ghost, that it appears. The thought of you is a wave breaking violently on the shore of my consciousness, merciless and cruel. To this question – the question of our bodies, together – there can never be an answer, only an endless retelling of the question to complete strangers.

  What desire can be against nature since it was given to man by nature? Across town, Alan is sitting naked on his toilet with a massive black rubber dildo jammed up his well-lubed arsehole, a bottle of poppers in his right hand from which he sniffs furiously at each stab of pain, like an asthmatic inhaling to assuage an attack. He has decided that he wants to get fisted and is trying to stretch himself in preparation. Over the weeks he has been progressing to bigger and bigger dildos. The diameter of the dildo now halfway inside his rectum is a good six inches. He is in agony, his cock shrivelled to nothing with the shock to his nerves. His head crackles black like a wartime wireless. He cannot understand why his sphincter refuses to ease and allow more of the black rubber to penetrate. His head swims with sounds like bells chiming, and just as he pulls on the dildo instead of pushing, trying to ease it out, he collapses, unconscious. He comes around face-down on the cold tile floor, his arse in the air, the small brown bottle still gripped in his fist, and an acute pain ripping up the centre of his back. He looks at his watch: twenty minutes have passed. This must be what it is like giving birth, he thinks, gently climbing back onto the toilet seat. I am giving birth to pleasure, to submission, to the destruction of my ‘self’; I am enabling the body to fragment and the fragments to circle around the central column of a destabilised subjectivity, like gulls riding a thermal. I am coaxing that tricky little muscle to do something it doesn’t want to do. I am dominating myself, sodomising myself, raping my body’s own desire for unity, storming the citadel of my sovereignty with the battering ram of madness.

  But if you could just see the beauty, there are things I could never describe.

  This is the thing I have prayed for; this is my unbroken prize. It is only by being ‘unnatural’ that one recovers from one’s naturalness, from one’s lack of spirituality.

  He said: ‘Making love is such an entire negation of isolated existence that we find it natural, even wonderful in a sense, that an insect dies in the consummation it sought out.’

  He wrote: ‘Begging on all fours to be fucked up the arse in the name of progress is the only authentic expression of humanity.’

  He sang: ‘You will know nothing unless you have known everything.’

  Right now, as my body splinters beneath your will, his words become dermagraphics that rotate on the surface of my skin, or rather not on the surface but just underneath the first layer, like solid objects pushing their sharp particularity through the tissuey membrane and making the sensations assailing me comprehensible, locatable, though only just, for they never become single discrete units, but rather form a vast network of traces rendering all the parts of my body unreachable by language or reason or any of the other consolations we use to avoid confronting the absence of logic; there are no divisions between language and the body other than those we create in our need for dissolution: I am not these words these words are not me not mine not his not ours they do not even belong to themselves… how then can we trust them, these perpetrators of Chinese whispers in the small hours that renege on their promises and leave us no less guideless and unsure in their presence than in their absence? But for now, as I lie here suspended and weightlessly joined to you, these words that circumnavigate my flesh take on the appearance of the sweetest embrace.

  In another place, at another time, the structure of society was such that these two men would find a way of communicating by which the elder passed on his knowledge to the younger. A certain tutelage would bind them, and the price of this bond would be the flesh; the pucker of the young man’s anus would yield to the hardened tip of the older man’s penis and, spittle-slicked, the firmness would puncture and slide in right up to the dark-haired root.

  Giving knowledge and giving pleasure, taking knowledge and taking pleasure. These exchanges are lost now, this particular form of libidinal economy confused, worn out, meaningless. Instead, these two men sit next to each other on the sofa and the older man listens to the younger man speak. He tells him t
hat his grandfather is dying, that he has been awake all night at the hospital. His voice is soft and lethargic, revealing no emotion or energy. Bored; his voice is bored. In the same uncertain monotone, he starts to talk about his favourite novels, which are all about serial killers. In one of them, a serial killer called the Birdman puts a live bird in the hollowed-out ribcage of his victims. He recounts a short story he is writing, about a female serial killer who cuts the fingers off a man she has just killed and masturbates with one of them.

  Seventeen and thirty-seven. There seems, to the older man, a curious symmetry to their ages. He begins to recall what he was like at seventeen, not listening much to the boy’s quiet mumble, but letting memories arise from the dark still waters he polices more and more these days. Some numerologist might unearth patterns in these two numbers, some cosmic link, some cabbalistic augury or message. But not me.

  ‘My teacher really liked the story,’ the boy mutters, ‘but she said she wouldn’t like to pay my psychiatric bills.’ His eyes are a clear, clean, glassy blue, fringed with long dark lashes. Surrounded by books most of which he has read, the older man can think of nothing to say.

  The silence that has fallen between them is fragile enough to be broken by the move of a hand. A simple gesture, such as the younger man sliding his hand across the older man’s thigh and letting it rest there. The older man responds by standing up and pulling the curtains closed, blocking out the late afternoon light. He sits back down and the hand returns to his thigh, sliding up to cup his stiffening crotch. Awkwardly, their mouths now meet; the older man is shocked by the softness of the boy’s face, and an image unfolds of the last time he kissed a woman. All of his life seems to scurry for cover under the tenderness of that beardless kiss. As their clothes are removed, the boy grows more animated. His lethargy, or shyness, diminishes as his nakedness increases. His lips are now circled with red from the older man’s stubble, his face open and radiant with need. The face unnerves me: I have seen it before, in a dream or a past life, or a memory since erased.

  If there is an exchange of knowledge here, in amongst the kissing and the licking and the sucking, it eludes them both, and after the deed is done they part none the wiser – or perhaps I am being unfair; perhaps there is something that each one takes away, like a prize, something to be kept and occasionally viewed as a reminder of what was achieved on that winter afternoon when their lives didn’t change, even though, in truth, they never expected them to.

  If desire is repressed it is because every position of desire, no matter how small, is capable of calling into question the established order of society.

  Into the depths of the shrubbery in Finsbury Park, on a warm, orangey-blue-skied summer night, I followed you. The greenblack trees seemed to part as you led me to a derelict scout hut, its outside walls pebbledashed with chips of moonlight, its windows paneless, filled with yellow veils of candlelight and the uncertain sway of shadows. The sound of voices reached us from inside. You moved closer and leaned in the window, and I did too, to notice that the floor was scattered with a forest of nightlights, radiating enough light to show us a group of four or five men sitting and drinking and smoking and talking amongst a debris of newspapers and cans, rubbers and fag-ends. You waved at one of them and he called out a hello.

  ‘Look what the cat’s dragged in!’ hissed a young boy in a white top, hood up, huddled over a beer can. ‘Is that your trade, love? Bring him here, let’s ’ave a proper look.’

  You hopped with ease into the room, a graceful movement perfected on other nights like this, and I clambered through for the first time, apprehensive and thrilled.

  ‘How many cocks you ’ad so far tonight?’ Hooded Top asked.

  ‘None,’ you said, leaving a pause before adding, ‘Yet,’ and looking at me.

  Hooded Top turned his face to me, ‘You don’t wanna touch her, luv. She’s got every disease known to mankind.’ And the group let out a gaggle of laughter.

  A limit is not an origin: a limit requires no origin.

  ‘Yeah,’ chipped in another, ‘she should carry a government health warning, that one!’

  ‘Shut it,’ you said, with a laugh in your voice, cracking open the can that someone had handed you. You took a long swig and handed it to me.

  ‘Well, I haven’t had one sniff of decent cock all night. It’s fucking dead out there,’ Hooded Top remarked. ‘Where’d you find this one?’ He looked me up and down.

  ‘Over by the tennis courts,’ you said.

  ‘Nice,’ Hooded Top said, looking at me.

  The unconscious is an orphan; it produces itself within the identity of nature and man.

  Then, picking up a nightlight and holding it to my face, he said, ‘Very nice.’ He put the light down and said, ‘I’m telling you, you don’t wanna be bothering with her, love, she’s got the tiniest cock you ever laid eyes on. You should see mine, though. I’ve got a right whopper, I have.’

  ‘Come on,’ you said, grabbing my hand, ‘I’ll show you around.’

  ‘No!’ shrieked Hooded Top. ‘We’ve not finished decorating yet! The place is a right fuckin’ state!’

  You smirked, and led me through a doorway blacker than the mouth of hell. ‘Have fun!’ someone yelled after us.

  We find the freedom to choose, in the firefull moment, between an endless series of possible selves.

  You led me into other rooms thick with a darkness that allowed no vision at all, so that as we ventured away from the others we could make out less and less of our surroundings. You flicked on your lighter and led me down a short hallway off which other rooms led, all with their doors hanging off, or kicked in. Language is embodied. In the bathroom your lighter flame illuminated the knuckled ceramic white of a toilet bowl. Everywhere rubble crunched underfoot. You led me into a larger room at the back of the building, where two men were fucking by a window. You doused the lighter. A series of grunts and sighs scurried across the room towards us. We moved nearer to them, till we could see their phosphorescent flesh and smell the amyl and rubber aura that surrounded them.

  The personal material of transgression does not exist prior to the prohibition. In other words, transgression is creative.

  You rubbed the front of my jeans and I rubbed the front of yours. The guy getting fucked gestured for us to move closer and you stood in front of him and unbuttoned your fly, feeding him your stiff cock. You gestured to me to move closer and I did, removing my own cock and offering that to his eager mouth. You kissed me, your hands roaming, and your eyes were staring straight into mine and when you dropped me a wink our joy lit up the room and you so close, your cock pushed up against mine inside this stranger’s mouth, your arm around my shoulder. And the guy fucking leaned across and joined in with our kiss, and the three of us sucked and slurped on each other’s tongues and the guy getting spitroasted let out a stream of muffled moans that reverberated down our cocks and up into our tongues, describing a circuit that shook all four of us where we stood like bolts of electricity through a lunatic’s daydreams. This is the way the world begins, in the instance of an instant that can never be recalled except anaemically so that the desire for desire becomes a desire for immediacy even in the face of impossibility until the moment when the moment when the moment becomes both less than itself and more than itself at the same time and the body chooses to reach out and touch it as it passes that moment of time and it is a touch such a touch of tongue brain cock arse such a touch that the moment is able to relive itself and never stop never stop and reflect only move towards that is the point only move towards the point that is coming that comes that is coming that comes that came that has gone: the eternal is present in an atom of duration.

  I must have a body because some obscure object lives within me.

  Ruby, who in a former life was Rudy, running around with his Chelsea hooligan mates kicking nine bells out of anyone and everyone, is telling us about her latest trade. Ruby has yet to have the chop the op and finds plenty of men who w
ant to suck on a cock in a frock. She is regaling us as we stand by the moonblue trees, having a break from the relentless hunt for satiety, performing for us the monologue with which she accompanied her last conquest. She is dressed to depress, in a black strappy number that shows off the scars where the British Bulldog and Union Jack tattoos have been removed; she stands there, cross-eyed with drink in a cross-eyed wig, yelling: ‘Oh, yeah, go on, baby, suck on my gonorrhoea, suck on my AIDS, suck on my herpes, yeah, suck it, suck my syphilis, go on, suck my AIDS, go on, suck it, suck my gonorrhoea, suck my herpes, suck my fucking AIDS.’ She waits for the laughter to die down before adding, ‘And you know what, the bastard wouldn’t even swallow.’