69 Things to Do With a Dead Princess (3 page)

After that we just lay together on the beach for a very long time. We didn’t think of taking a shower before we went to bed, we just wanted to collapse. We had sand all over us and after a bit more shagging, the bed was really gritty. We fucked some more in the tangled sheets when we woke. Then we headed for Saffron Walden. After parking the car we made our way into Bridge End Gardens. There was bird shit all over the benches in the park. Having squeezed through a piece of broken fence, we entered the Bridge End hedge maze from the east side. It took a lot of twisting and turning before we found our way to the centre. The statues and other monuments that originally decorated the maze had been removed. We made love at the goal and at this point I woke.

TWO

I AWOKE
suddenly from the dark pool of sleep, Alan was already stirring, slipping out from between my floral duvet and a white sheet. It took me a while to remember who Alan was. I could hear him pissing into the toilet as I put the events of the previous day into place. When Alan re-entered my bedsit I laughed because he hadn’t dressed and I knew that would have given the nymphomaniac who lived opposite me quite a thrill if she’d run into him on the stairs. Then I saw Hannah, my sex-mad neighbour, following Alan through the door. Hannah liked group sex and when she brought a bloke home who I found attractive it wasn’t unknown for me to join in.

Alan stood above me grinning. Hannah embraced him from behind. Her hands snaked around his torso and she stroked his cock into an erection, then held it tightly. Hannah put the index finger of her free hand into her mouth and proceeded to massage saliva into Alan’s left nipple. He squirmed with pleasure. I sat up and took Alan’s cock in my mouth. Hannah sank to her knees and began to rim him. As I lubricated the length, I could feel myself getting all wet. I got onto my knees and turned around, so that Alan could enter me from behind, standing up. Hannah removed her skirt and panties, then climbed onto the bed. She pushed my head down against the mattress and clambered onto my back, lying with her back against my back and her legs swung over Alan’s shoulders.

I couldn’t see anything, my eyes were closed but I knew from the sounds and movement of our bodies that Alan was licking Hannah out as he gave me a shafting. I came as Alan shot his load into my hole and from the way she screamed, I knew an orgasm had washed through Hannah’s body too. There was a tangle of limbs and Hannah struggled up. Told us she had to rush or she’d be late for work. Alan crawled into bed beside me and we slept for the best part of two hours. We made love when we woke up. The missionary position, nothing exotic. Eventually we dressed. I was out of milk so we went to Carmine’s on Union Terrace for an early lunch. Over pasta and cappuccinos we discussed literature.

Alan commented on my collection of Kathy Acker’s work –
Great Expectation
,
Blood and Guts in High School
,
Don Quixote
,
Literal Madness
,
Empire of the Senseless
,
Portrait of an Eye
,
In Memoriam to Identity
,
My Mother: Demonology
,
Hannibal Lecter My Father
,
Bodies of Work
,
Eurydice in the Underworld
and
Pussy, King of the Pirates
. Alan admired Kathy Acker but said he could never read through to the end of her books. He was surprised when I told him I just read passages at random, it made no sense to read Kathy Acker from beginning to end. At some point Alan told me that in her essays Acker fell behind the premises from which she started out in her fiction. I told Alan he didn’t know how to read. Imagine starting on page one with a book and then proceeding through to the end.

I’d heard stories about a number of the male writers Kathy lived with at varying times in her life. They tended to be less talented and less successful than Acker. It is alleged that one of these writers convinced himself that he was Kathy Acker while she was away on a promotional tour. When Kathy returned home, the young writer was unable to sustain the fantasy that he was a successful novelist and suffered a nervous breakdown. Alan didn’t think the story was true. It sounded suspiciously as if it was a fragment culled from a post-modern novel. Besides, Kathy was too cryptic to be involved in something so obvious. He began talking about Michael Bracewell, who I’d always thought of as a journalist. Alan produced three Bracewell novels from his bag. He told me Kathy Acker discovered Bracewell and took him to Serpent’s Tail, who published his first book.

Alan explained that Bracewell was one of the first style or club novelists, an achievement that should be placed in the context of the long history of fiction aimed at teenagers. I still have three of Alan’s Bracewell books and by looking through them I’ve been trying to piece together what he said over pasta at Carmine’s. You can see from the books that Bracewell learnt to write as he went along. The prose style in
The Crypto-Amnesia Club
and
Missing Margate
, both dating from 1988, is quite atrocious. By the time
Saint Rachel
was published in 1995, Bracewell was producing chiselled prose in the mould of Aldous Huxley or Evelyn Waugh. Regardless of whether one likes the traditional English novel, it is still possible to appreciate the way Bracewell transformed himself into a prose stylist.

It is difficult to imagine Kathy Acker liking
Saint Rachel
, although Lynne Tillman admires it. Kathy would have liked everything bad about Bracewell. The flash. The coy iconoclasm of
Missing Margate
, which becomes a gender-bender novel when read alongside
The Fountainhead
by Ayn Rand. The way in which Bracewell’s nostalgia for an England that never was allowed him to be seduced by everything post-modern. Those are the things Acker would have liked about Bracewell. Alan made the point that Bracewell’s tragedy was that he’d learnt to write. The future was always leaking back and influencing the past. Having written competent works, Bracewell could never operate beneath the threshold of critical opinion.

The 80s ended in economic depression and while Bracewell’s early work was marketed as satire, it was ultimately a celebration of middle-class consumerism. Everything had gone wrong and as
Saint Rachel
documented, it ended in Prozac. Bracewell’s flaw was being more intelligent than Cyril Connolly. He knew from the beginning that he was a bad patriot, that the England he lusted after never had and never would exist. Bracewell was fixated on Englishness but his works described a different country from the land inhabited by the working-class heroes celebrated in best-selling books like
England Away
by John King. Bracewell came from Sutton and he overcame this lower-middle-class environment through celebrations of upward mobility.

In re-inventing himself Bracewell had to think through all the moves required to pass as completely bourgeois. The simulacrum was almost perfect but he lacked the arrogance and sheer stupidity of Anthony Powell. The broken relationships endlessly documented in Bracewell’s novels function as signifiers of his broken dreams. He was a pastoralist even when he wrote about the city. Bracewell’s second ‘major’ work was first published as part of
The Quick End
– works by three young novelists. When the time for reprinting came around, Don Watson and Mark Edwards were dropped and
Missing Margate
came out on its own. Bracewell was an 80s novelist. He lives on in journalism and TV appearances. Hotels, restaurants, designer clothes, a life-style organised around these objects of desire could never be sustained on royalties earned from moderately successful novels.

Bracewell had to fail in order to succeed. He’d a good reputation but hadn’t amassed the sales to justify 20-grand advances. It was the media that provided him with the readies to sustain a middle-class life-style. Many writers are tempted by the money to be made from journalism. Bracewell was smart, he didn’t strip-mine his subconscious by churning out confessional columns. Five-thousand-word features in the broadsheet press became his speciality, his name still carries connotations of quality. Bracewell hasn’t embarrassed those literary figures who backed him early on, he isn’t a Colin Wilson or Iain M. Banks. His early publishers are still proud of him.

The 80s have disappeared, most of the writers from that era are more or less forgotten. If Bracewell’s work as a novelist is compared to the musical achievements of Duran Duran or Culture Club, his fellow travellers in a decade that style forgot don’t even rank alongside the likes of Sigue Sigue Sputnik. Alan specifically mentioned John Wilde in relation to this. A hack like Wilde could only be compared to a band that never made it, a name that meant nothing. Having travelled in Bracewell’s wake, the best a scribbler like Wilde could hope for was an afterlife interviewing burnt-out celebrities, a freelance fantasy without beginning or end. Wilde was voodooed, hexed, left trapped in the very nightmare Bracewell successfully escaped through acts of bewitchment.

Alan wanted to play a prank on Suzy. He called her from a pay phone and got himself invited to her pad. I had to round up a bunch of people Suzy knew. Suzy lived near the campus and loads of students passed her first-floor flat when they were making their way into the centre of town. Alan explained to Suzy that he’d always wanted to have sex with a woman while she leant out of a window conversing with her friends. Suzy was up for it. Alan kissed and cuddled Suzy, then took her knickers down and fingered her clit. Once the juice was really flowing, Suzy leant out of the flat to see who was in the street. I was talking to Jill beneath her living-room window. Suzy greeted us and asked us what we were doing. I explained that we were discussing Iain Sinclair’s novels and that we both thought the deliberate ambiguity in his prose had close affinities with Andy Warhol’s pop art.

Suzy was leaning out of the window, net curtains splayed down her back. I couldn’t see Alan but I knew he had Suzy’s skirt around her waist and that he was humping away. I’d arranged for a great many of Suzy’s friends to wander down the street and soon there was a crowd of 20 people talking to her. Suzy’s face was flushed and her conversation was incoherent. Suzy didn’t like Michael, the guy who lived above her because he played Bob Dylan albums late at night. Michael was in one of my classes at the university and I’d rung him before Alan and I headed our separate ways. Michael had agreed that once a crowd of us had gathered in the street, he’d go and knock on Suzy’s door. Alan whispered to Suzy that he’d deal with the caller. He walked out of the living room and into the hall. Alan adjusted his clothing, then let Michael into the flat.

Suzy didn’t know it was Michael when he took Alan’s place behind her. Michael had always fancied Suzy and was glad of a chance to fuck her. Suzy was trying to hold a conversation, so she wouldn’t have noticed the change of rhythm when the two men switched places. Alan made his way onto the street and joined our group. He looked up at Suzy, greeted her and asked if she remembered him from the previous night. Suzy did a double take, her face a mask of confusion. Then she screamed. After Suzy came Alan explained the trick he’d played on her and with Michael still humping away this provided sufficient stimulation to give my friend a second orgasm.

Suzy invited everyone up to her flat and got the guys present to gang-bang her. I was up for having an orgy but Alan restrained me. He insisted that it was Suzy’s turn to be the centre of attention and that I shouldn’t deny her this moment of glory. Alan was going through Suzy’s books, she didn’t have that many but he was impressed when he came across a copy of the
Selected Political Writings of Rosa Luxemburg
, edited by Dick Howard and published by the Monthly Review Press. This was ‘a radical America book’ from way back when in 1971. Likewise, Alan was amused when he discovered that Suzy had a copy of
I Love Dick
by Chris Kraus. This book incoherently documents the author’s sexual obsession with Dick Hebdige, an English academic who was an intellectual celebrity during the 80s on the strength of
Subculture: The Meaning of Style
.

Subculture
was Hebdige’s first book and it was published in 1979, at a time when students still thought a polytechnic lecturer incredibly hip if he could talk about youth culture. Alan had to explain this to me because by the time I went to university every campus boasted its resident experts on the subject. Alan was amused that 20 years down the line Hebdige was being consumed as an object of desire rather than an expert on consumer fetishism. Alan found trends in academic publishing an endlessly absorbing topic and once he’d had his say about Hebdige, he moved on to Judith Williamson. Either then or later I argued with Alan when he insisted that the true value of
I Love Dick
lay in the way it exposed the misery of academic life and dished the dirt not only on Dick Hebdige but also on the likes of Felix Guattari and Toni Negri. I insisted the section on Hannah Wilke was the most useful thing in
I Love Dick
, although I also appreciated it as a parody of post-modern theorising. Once all the guys present had given Suzy a shafting, someone suggested we go down the pub. People began to leave, drifting off in different directions.

Alan wanted to sell some of his books, so we headed to his place on Union Grove to collect them. Alan’s flat looked pretty much as we’d left it, a mess. He started throwing books around. Making piles of first editions. Shuffling paperbacks. He kept turning over works by Jean Baudrillard as though they were trumps. He told me that he’d been rereading Bracewell because he was interested in the way psychoanalysis had transformed and retrenched 19th-century notions of characterisation and literary depth. From there he’d got onto an 80s kick. Leafing through the copy of
I Love Dick
by Chris Kraus at Suzy’s place hadn’t helped. Kraus was married to Sylvere Lotringer, who’d played a major role in translating, publishing and generally foisting Baudrillard on English-speaking readers during the 80s.
I Love Dick
was a down-market American equivalent of Baudrillard’s
Cool Memories
where everything was allowed to hang out, including the fact that its author doesn’t hack it as a writer of aphorisms.