Twentysix Read online

  ‘Drink,’ he says, ‘I’ll be wanting your piss later.’

  In the intellectual representations in circulation, pleasure is reduced to a concession; in other words, it is reduced to a diversion whose role is subsidiary.

  Pleasure is expenditure; we exchange kisses that chew at flesh and lick at teeth, drawing sighs and some kind of sweetness from deep within. We create an economy of pleasure. He dribbles spittle into my mouth. I drink it. We move to the bedroom and strip and climb onto the bed. I nuzzle the fur on his chest and release a groan. This is a great place to be. I hold it, this place, for as long as I dare. (In many ways, I have yet to let go, even now, all these years later. The combined sensation of his fuzzy chest against my face and his hard cock pressed against my stomach still hovers somewhere just underneath my skin. It would take nothing, a mere thought or gesture, as now, for me to conjure it and hold it again. The memory is a gift I cherish.)

  He gets up and goes into the lounge, returning with a small plastic box from which he removes a blue diamond-shaped pill. He snaps it in two with his teeth and hands me one half, which I swallow with a swig of beer. He necks the other himself, swallowing without beer. He holds out his open palm and I lick up the white tablet that lies in it. He swallows his and we come together again in kisses that say all we need to say. It is raining outside. It has been raining all day. I can feel it on my skin. It dissolves me. It washes away all anxiety as it soaks through to the marrow, making my body disappear completely, leaving me naked, vulnerable as happiness itself. Half an hour later, we break for a cigarette – at least, I smoke, and then place my lips upon his and blow the grey fumes into his mouth.

  Like the anus, the mouth is a site at which the dispersion of the body’s drives and instincts becomes concentrated, crystallised, and dangerously pleasurable.

  He inhales, taking the smoke deep within his lungs, throwing back his head and closing his eyes as the diluted smoke shoots out of his nostrils. With the tip of my tongue I trace a line from the hollow of his neck to the nub of his chin.

  ‘Second-hand smoke tastes so good,’ he says with a white grin. Chaos and calm: it seems sometimes that all of my life has been spent shuttling between those two emotions, the one pushing the other like a magnetic pole until some kind of brief, momentary harmony between the two forces is achieved, only to be broken in a split second which tilts me back again to one or the other. It exhausts me, this battle, but such exhaustion has a compulsion all its own that draws me towards it nevertheless, like seeking transient reprise in a hurricane’s eye.

  This exchange, from my lungs to his, this rope of smoke that encircles our spirits like a garland – this is what I came for.

  You tell me you want to lick your boyfriend’s cock while he fucks me. You tell me you don’t often get to see your boyfriend fuck someone. You are as excited as a child on Christmas morning. I am on my hands and knees, impaled so deeply by your boyfriend’s cock that it seems like he has penetrated the entire length of my spine. The tension unravels and my rectum flickers around the solidity of him, responding to its presence in waves of muscular pulsion as we fall into the rhythm of each other. I can hear you both breathing behind me. I can feel your face against my buttocks as you lick him. You are so excited by this that you come, all across my back, loudly howling and barking your immense pleasure. Later you explain that the first time you had sex with a man was in a cave by the sea, and once you were inside the cave five fishermen in their boats set up just outside the cave’s entrance, so you both had to come without a sound. Ever since, you tell me, you have these occasional intense orgasms that tear themselves out of you like a birth, leaving you fragile and bereft. It’s like a near-death experience, you explain, and one day, you are convinced, it will kill you. This little death – this savagery that tears us momentarily from our bodies – will one day gather up its strength and fell us. Just as no man can know another’s death, so we each remain isolated in our pleasure, this delicate shell of nerve-endings acting like a barrier, a boundary, against which the world dissolves. The soul is made of the same stuff as ghosts, after all. It haunts our bodies, ranging through the empty, dusty rooms of the flesh looking for a mate, and, finding none, imagines itself alone, when in truth, in the next room, breathing stirs the embers: existence toiling like a beast on all fours against the dissolution of personal identity.

  We are waiting for another man to arrive, whom we’ll call S. S arrives, and he is taller than me, stockier, shaved head, pleasant face, and almost immediately R has pulled down S’s trackpants to reveal a thick, cut, semi-hard nine-incher, which he proceeds to suck into full splendour. I watch from the couch, loving the sight, until R gestures me over and I kneel beside him, and he feeds me S’s cock. The chemicals are kicking in now and knocking down all my reserve like a bull at a gate. S’s cock feels so good. I take it right down to the thick root until it fills me entirely. The surrounding presence of wounded males is already a blessing that is granted me in this festival of inner calm. I suppose I could describe the combinations of bodies, the interactions of sensation, the way R and I take turns riding S’s huge hard cock, the sight of R draining a pint glass of my clear beery piss – I could try and capture that, somehow, I suppose. I could try to find words that might inscribe the warm outlines of our intensity, but how can you draw a line around a flame, around the molten heat of my orgasm – R working my arse with the thickest black rubber cock and S pushing his prick deeper down my throat? Deep within my body the tip of S’s cock touches the tip of the dildo, and a blue bolt snaps between them like a synapse.

  Erotic play discloses a nameless world, which is revealed by the nocturnal language of lovers. Such language is not written down. It is whispered into the ear at night, but by dawn it has been forgotten. The kisses the three of us shared cannot be shared. They are from a world only we inhabited; a land of dark and innocent pleasures, a land that could sustain us with its natural resources if it weren’t so ripped and torn and plagued with insanity. The land of a joy only shadows can know and taste. It cannot be demonstrated, cannot be shown, except at the point of its own rupture, its own disappearance.

  In the blue-licked curves of a shoreline cave, saltwater lapping at their thighs, two naked men stand, prick to prick, so sweet, locked in a clinch that craves. Their ascent to the summits of pleasure marks the beginning of time: this is the way the world begins. In shadows and heat, in caves where silence echoes. On hitting the water, their sperm turns into a shoal of silvered fish that swims around their calves, sparkling like tiny lights and plucking kisses from the sweet flesh.

  This a world I will never know, and this is a world I defend. Language makes the soul possible, yet every statement we make remains a betrayal. This is the way the world begins. Like a dream we try to locate and unpick, these emotions unravel their wares. It remains like a sensation, like a memory, this other life, rippling beneath my skin, turning me into a beam of light as it cuts through a wave.

  Fascination is a process by which we are pulled further away from reason, and thus it threatens to destabilise the world as something known.

  A shaft of sunlight picks out the smooth whiteness of a man’s naked body through the trees, reclined on a towel spread over the grey of a gravestone. He’s playing with his semi-hard cock and, as I stand observing, another man approaches him and lowers his open mouth onto it. I walk on, down the narrow, angular pathways, not knowing quite what I am looking for until I find it. How it will arrive, and what it will look like, are unknown to me as yet, and the mystery fuels the search. The summer sun is hot as I pass through patches of it breaking between the trees in bright flickers of light. I want everything. The freedom and the guile. I don’t want to leave here without it.

  In this place of the dead we bring ourselves to life, our seed enriching this soil, these feral shadows. We scratch and claw amidst the undergrowth like animals and we rut and rut, locked into a present we want to sustain. The frenzy, perhaps, comes from knowing we can’t.
It ends. It ends. And even now you’re miles away, boxing with your absurd shadow. Does the body reconcile us to death or does it provide a diversion from it? And these places we find, these arbitrary places of furtive pleasure, what kind of map do they draw? All this I am, and I want to be: at the same time dove, serpent, and pig.

  We need a thinking that does not fall apart in the face of pleasure, a self-consciousness that does not steal away when it is time to explore possibility to the limit.

  I made so much noise when I came that you asked if I was all right. This disembodied voice from behind the door. For twenty minutes you’d sucked me into a frenzy, an infinity, a place I cannot name. And the anonymity breaks, a subjectivity emerges from behind the sensation of cock and mouth, beyond the noise you pulled from me, like a lifeguard hoisting a drowner from a pool.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said.

  The door has graffiti on it, some primitive drawing of a spurting cock. It keeps me both inside your flat and outside your flat at the same time. I am in the hallway, at the top of a flight of stairs. Behind me, the wall is adorned with camouflage netting. Techno music bleeds from behind the door in which two holes have been cut and curtained with black fabric. I seek pleasure. I seek the nerves under my skin. The narrow pathway; the layers; the scroll of ancient hieroglyphs.

  If identification is a nomination, a designation, then simulation is the writing corresponding to it, writing that is strangely polyvocal, flush with the real. Desire is part of the infrastructure.

  Beyond the anonymity, our separate lives spin their own particular courses, going to people and places we will never share, or never know. In this thought – perhaps – lies at least part of the pleasure, expressed directly in those sounds that ripped from me. This body is stolen. This simple world becomes too much. These limbs are not my limbs.

  The section entitled ‘P’ contains a quotation from Jean Genet’s novel, Funeral Rites, translated by Bernard Frechtman, New York: Grove Press, 1969, p.21.

  Section ‘R’ includes a quotation from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translated by Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993, p.288.

  Acknowledgements

  The biggest love to my family, and to my Benjamin.

  To my agent, Adrian Weston, and the team at Myriad Editions – Candida Lacey, Vicky Blunden, Corinne Pearlman, Linda McQueen and Emma Dowson – I owe everything. This text is what it is thanks in particular to Vicky and Linda’s skilled eyes, creative insight and patient hearts.

  To my fabulous, loyal and indulgent friends, especially Michael Atavar, Darius Amini, Abigail Bamsey, John Lee Bird, Alex Black, Helen Boulter, Pippa Brooks, George Cayford, Matthew Fennimore, Lucien Gouiran, Sally Gross, Hally, Wendyl Harris, Alexis Joshua, Louise Lambe, Sadie Lee, Clayton Littlewood, James Maker, David Male, Steve Muscroft, Joe Pop, Clive Reeve, Chris Rose, Stephane Sionville, Matthew Stradling, Justin Ward, Sue Smallwood, Roy Woolley. Huge love to Mich Jamieson and David Hoyle.

  To Jim MacSweeney and Uli Lenart at Gay’s the Word, the best bookshop in the world, where I first read some of these pieces in public.

  An extract from this work appeared in The Everyday Experiment: Sampling the design, the queer and the politics in the everyday, edited and published by Andrew Slatter, 2010.

  Winner of the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award

  Shortlisted for the Green Carnation Prize

  If you liked Twentysix, you might

  like Jonathan Kemp’s critically acclaimed

  début novel London Triptych.

  For an exclusive extract, read on…

  1954

  I spent last night in a police cell.

  Gore had taken me to my first queer pub, the Lord Barrymore, near Regent’s Park. I’ve walked past it on several occasions, never imagining for a minute what it was, and not being a pub person I’d never had cause to go in. But last night we went for a drink there.

  A few weeks ago, Gore was astonished to hear that I’d never been inside a queer pub. He refused even to believe me to begin with. Once I convinced him that it was true, he insisted the situation be rectified. I agreed to go to one with him. A few weeks went by and nothing more was said about it. But yesterday, I brought the subject up and asked whether he was free that evening. He said yes, so after our meal we got a cab into town.

  I felt a great deal of trepidation during the cab ride, and despite all the wine we’d drunk with our meal I was incredibly nervous as we entered. There was a lot of rococo carved glass over and behind the counter and a number of mahogany chairs with red leather upholstery. A fog of cigarette smoke blurred the air. Apparently it had only gone queer in the last few months; before that it was an ordinary public house. Gore informed me that once a place has become established as a queer pub, the police start raiding it on a regular basis so that the clientele have to move on to another pub.

  There were about thirty people there when we arrived. All of them turned to look at us when we walked in. As we made our way to the bar I noticed Gore nod acquaintance to a few men and I wondered if any of them were his punters, but dismissed the thought. There were two or three young soldiers by the dartboard, and a clutch of young men standing by the fire who seemed to be wearing make-up, the paint illuminated by the firelight. The rest were an unremarkable and fairly typical crowd of men. I overheard bits of conversations as I followed Gore. Dog-ends, my mother used to call them.

  ‘She said, “Well don’t ask me, dear, I’ve only got two inches of vagina left.”’

  ‘So, by the time I finally got to Kathmandu…’

  ‘If I catch you strolling and caterwauling I’ll beat the milk out of your breasts, so I will.’

  ‘Smell her!’

  Gore ordered the drinks and I gave him the money to pay for them. As he took it, I noticed those around us watching the transaction, and knew how it must seem to them. A feeling of both pride and shame washed through me.

  If only.

  It was easy enough finding a seat, and Gore said it was because most people preferred to stand so they could observe everything, or rather everyone, in the room. There didn’t seem much to observe to me. Just a regular public house, except perhaps for the occasional shriek of hysterical laughter and the absence of women. I said as much to Gore when he returned with the drinks, and he explained that glances were being constantly exchanged and rendezvous being arranged without a word being spoken – an invisible web being spun around us of covert eye movements and facial gestures you’d be hard-pushed to notice. The soldiers, apparently, are well known for letting you fellate them in the gents’, if you slip them a couple of quid.

  Gore told me that the regulars call the landlord Mother. And in these places most of the punters are regulars. He explained that all eyes had been on us because they had never seen me before. I said I found the attention rather strange. He laughed, and I wasn’t sure if he was laughing at me.

  At that point, a grey-haired old man in an extremely tight burgundy velvet jacket and blue cravat, who had been staring and blinking at Gore ever since we’d sat down, came up to the table and grabbed Gore’s hand. In the fruitiest voice, he said, ‘Young man, when you have a few spare hours and I have a few spare pounds of plaster of Paris, you must let me make a cast of your hands. They’re divine.’

  ‘Away with you, Jack!’ Gore laughed, pulling his hand free.

  ‘I’m serious, Gregory, I intend to immortalise them in bronze.’ A lascivious grin spread across his face. ‘And your cock too, if you’d let me.’ He gave Gore a nudge.

  ‘Behave,’ Gore said, ‘there’ll be none of that talk in front of my friend here. He’s an artist. A real artist.’ Gore nodded in my direction.

  Jack held out a limp hand for me to shake. ‘Jack Rose.’

  ‘Colin Read. Pleased to meet you.’ I shook his hand.

  ‘I knew an artist once,’ he said.

  ‘Sure you did, Jack, sure you did,’ Gore teased,
looking at me. ‘Didn’t you meet Mr Oscar Wilde himself, now?’

  ‘No word of a lie,’ he said, dropping the genteel accent and trowelling on the Cockney. ‘I was a beautiful boy, not ashamed to say it, a shiny ripe apple in this veritable Eden, and Mr Wilde liked beautiful boys, as did all the swells that came my way. But we had something special, Mr Wilde and I. Treated me like gold, he did. Here, take a vada at this,’ he said, plunging his hand into his inside jacket pocket and plucking out a tatty sepia photograph. He handed it over and said, ‘Just you read what’s written on the back of that, Mr Read, go on, read it. Aloud, if you don’t mind.’

  I read. ‘“To Jack, my favourite writing desk, O.W.”’

  I said I was impressed, that I had enjoyed many of Wilde’s writings.

  ‘I had a silver cigarette case, too, what he gave me. But the filth took that.’ He helped himself to a sip from my drink. ‘It’s a crime what this country did to that man, a crime!’ he hissed.

  Then without further encouragement he launched into a monologue. ‘When they locked ’im up, London sank to its knees, five years before the century did, tatty and knackered, as grey as Victoria’s hair. The inns were empty, the drag balls wiped off the face of the city like a tart’s panstick. Most of the well-to-do queens had sodded off abroad, the ones who stayed too scared to play out their lust. The party was over. I fucked off up to Manchester, but I had such a miserable time I came back after a year. You ever been? Don’t bother. I missed London. But the London I missed was no more.’