Twentysix (2 page)

C
c

A
t three a.m., at the back of Jack Straw’s Castle, a fissure opens up in reality, through which he steps, and a new world unfolds beneath his feet; the trees grow denser with each step, the air more primitive and wild. He looks across the tree-tops and beyond to a sky the colour of which remains nameless, knowing that this night will never leave him. On his deathbed this memory will visit him like a nursing angel. The timeless landscape matches the timeless feeling inside. The wind gets tangled in the tops of the trees. The night races forward like a dark horse. Fear and desire commingle within the swinging pendulum of his stomach. The distinctive sound of a slap against bare flesh flaps through the air towards him.

‘Come on,’ his friend whispers excitedly, grabbing his arm, breaking the reverie, ‘there’s someone at the Spanking Tree.’

The two friends move quickly through a shadowed clump of trees, where men lean and loiter, others passing slowly by, skirting close enough to make out the value of the chase. Now and then a cigarette tip burns red
against the black, or a lighter flame momentarily pulls a face from out of the dark.

They emerge in a clearing, in the centre of which lies a fallen tree, its trunk worn to a bare polish, its branches withered or broken. A naked man lies across the curve of the trunk, and in the half-light they can make out his moonwhite buttocks. Another man is standing beside him, bringing his palm down in slowly paced smacks that ripple through the silence. A group of men forms around them: hands moving across bodies, cocks emerging from flies, mouths meeting mouths. Outside the circle, a daddy bear stands holding his boy’s black leather jacket. He is big and round and white-bearded, Santa Claus in faded denim. His boy stands tall and lean and smoothly white amidst the pack, jeans puddled at his feet, white T-shirt rucked behind his head. Several men kneel before him, taking it in turns to suck him. The two friends approach, have their go and move on. Daddy walks over and whispers something to his cub and the young boy lifts his jeans and lowers his T-shirt and they walk away, to start somewhere else. Two or three men follow, dancing to his tune, cruising to the sweet smell of this naked climate.

The darkness moves like a vapour, coagulating around bodies – only to evaporate in their heat. As the two friends move silently on one of them spots someone and, grabbing the other by the wrist, pulls him towards new prey. He approaches a tall, well-built skinhead, whispers something to him. The words disappear, lost forever. The three men move off towards some bushes,
unlocatable now, without those maps that have yet to be drawn. Tucked into a space behind a tree, the two friends kneel before the skinhead’s porn-star cock, passing the amyl and taking it in turns to choke and sniff, choke and sniff. The skinhead lets loose a stream of verbal in rough cockney: ‘Look at him demeaning himself, sucking on that fascist cock with his nigger lips. You like that big fascist cock, don’t you, you filthy cocksucking queer.’ The two friends will laugh about this later, but for now they are hungry so they feed, passing the cock between them, each enjoying watching the other go to work. Sharing it brings something to the act that, had only one of them been present, would be missing. A thrill, a joy, an intimacy it would be impossible to try to name or describe. They push their faces forward and open their mouths in unison when the skinhead says he is about to come, and receive the blessing as their just reward. In this world they have entered, this drink is the only nutrition. Like extracting the sap from rare fruits, they will move from tree to tree for hours, sometimes finding nothing, sometimes a feast.

On their way out, the man selling drinks and poppers from a bench near the car park will ask, ‘Had yer Weetabix, lads?’

Driving out of the car park as the sun begins to rise, they will pass a short, stocky, hairy man squeezed into a blue-sequinned mini-dress, rocking on black kitten heels, his big fuzzy arms swinging by his side, off to taste the freedom only found in this other world, and then only rarely. The night folds up like a sheet of paper,
sliding itself into their memories, to be unfolded and relived, recounted and treasured.

Sometimes life isn’t meant to make sense.

D
d

O
r that time when I awoke to the rhythm of you fucking me, taking me, pulling me by the waist towards you, slamming against me, me slamming against you as I rise into consciousness like a swimmer breaking the surface, breathless and disorientated, locating myself, drowning in sensation. The darkness and the pillow and you inside me like fireworks. I know I’ll never know that night again. Nor that brutal love that’s locked within my blood.

The projector jams, the screen blistering into white light as the celluloid disintegrates and the scene dissolves. I disintegrate and the scene dissolves.

Or that time in the cemetery one hot summer afternoon, sheltered only by the thin curtain of greenery growing over the doorway we have joined within, your body in my body, locked in some secret pact that pushes us together, as if our only hope of salvation is to merge into one single creature, my shorts round my knees, my bare skin brushed by brickdust, my love for you immeasurable.

Or that time on the roof, both naked, draped in summernight heat, the city spinning around us like a
ring of meteors which satellites the planet our bodies have made. Circling us, the universe expands its star-flecked possibilities, and Heaven rains down, not thunderbolts, but flowers, that fall on us and about us in bursts of colour.

These moments tear at me, clawing for attention. My body is a book overflowing with stories that can’t be read without your hands roaming the Braille of my sensations.

The possibility of using our bodies as a source of very numerous pleasures is something that is very important. Sexuality is part of our behaviour, part of our freedom, something that we ourselves create. It is our creation, and much more than the discovery of a secret side of our desire. With it we make and unmake the world. With it, we speak a different tongue.

E
e

T
he communication joining lovers depends on the nakedness of their laceration. Their love signifies that neither can see the being of the other but only a wound and a need to be ruined. And no greater desire exists than a wounded person’s need for another wound.

All attempts at joy are futile but necessary, like everything we do. But it is not until we are out of the dark that we can assess the extent of the damage. The doorbell rings, and we run down to the hallway in our underpants, giggling like children. As the skunk wends its way through the burrows of my mind, I feel desire uncoil within like a bullwhip, lashing out at the world to see what it can fell.

He had wanted us naked when he arrived, but we compromised with underwear.

He had wanted us on our knees, so, after turning the key and pulling the door slightly ajar, I fall to my knees, the consummate act of submissive worship. Erotic submission is a limit-experience, beyond which something else comes into play, something not quite human. It all happens so quickly, and time slows down
only once it has passed. The organic flows of the body – sperm, blood, piss and shit – are conducive to the amorphous manifestations of corporeal pleasure. The human body shatters beneath a multiplicity of sensations and intensities the overall experience of which results in what has been erroneously called ‘the subject’. My question is this: can the movements and flows of the body be represented, or does representation itself only function upon a foreclosure of such nomadic flesh? 

F
f

A
s much as language threatens the body, however, the body also threatens language.

The music is loud, guitar-based, rock pop. The space in front of the stage where earlier a band had played is now scattered with people dancing. In the centre of the crowd, stripped to the waist, his lean body hairless and slick with sweat, this lupine man whirls inside the unpredictable steps of St Vitus. He unbuttons his flies and lets his baggy jeans slink to the floor, revealing his cock. He moves too fast, too manic, for anyone to do anything but watch. His head is an explosion of dark thick curls, his face all Caravaggio hunger and intensity. I have barely articulated to myself how much I want him when he is pulling up his jeans and tearing through the crowd towards me: a cannonball in human form. He fells me and we crawl and roll like wrestlers in the
beer-mud
that covers the bare wood floor. I manage to fight loose and stand up only to be floored once more, this time pushed backwards onto an empty couch against the wall. He lands with a belly flop that momentarily winds me. I am dizzy with lust and confusion. His warm
wet skin is under my hands, his hands are on me, one down the front of my jeans, squeezing my cock. ‘I’ve got a big thick Irish cock,’ he drawls warmly in my ear in his rich Dublin brogue, ‘I know what you boys like.’ Through the haze of the drink and the speed of the encounter, I look past the boy’s shoulder to see a barman standing watching us, terrified and unsure what to do. The boy kisses me, hard and urgently, and the lights on the ceiling kaleidoscope wildly. The music allows me to imagine this isn’t happening in reality; it is only my wishes assaulting me. My booze-sodden imagination has created something that seems real, the way a dream can when you inhabit it, but dissolves once you crawl from the damp cave of sleep. I slide my hand down the back of his jeans and take in the firm round perfection of his arse, the blunt suede hardness of his coccyx. His skin beneath my palm is hot and wet. The barman invades this Eden in which we lie and says, ‘Oi, lads, pack it in, will you?’ I don’t feel any danger, only the hot hot heat of the immediate, and this loud bright crazy music seems to be the only voice I hear.

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.