69 Things to Do With a Dead Princess (6 page)

After our meal we drove out to the airport. Well, not really to the airport. We drove along the edge of an industrial estate behind the airport and then up a rough track, curving around a field. We’d arrived at Tyrebagger Hill and all we had to do to reach the recumbent stone circle situated on it was climb over a gate and cut across a field. Abandoned electricity pylons towered above us while a constant stream of planes and choppers soared into the sky from the airstrip below. Oil had made Aberdeen a busy airport. The stones were in a circle of trees and the site was extremely ambient. A surreal juxtaposition of ancient and modern. The airport, the industrial estate, the abandoned pylons and the stone circle. Alan claimed this combination was a killer. Real magic. No wonder K. L. Callan kicked off
69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess
with a visit to this site. Since I hadn’t even looked at the book Alan had given me the previous evening, I didn’t know what he was talking about. However I did think it a little strange that Alan weighed down his ventriloquist’s dummy with bricks and carried it up to the monument. I didn’t know Alan well, so I refrained from commenting upon his eccentric behaviour.

Recumbent stone circles are made up from a large stone on its side with two tall flanking stones, then a ring of stones radiating around this point of focus. The recumbent stone at Tyrebagger was tilted forward and there’d been a fire underneath it. The ash was stone-cold. Alan turned me around and made me kneel in it. Then my ride dropped his pants. His Levi’s fell down around his ankles, his briefs only got as far as his knees. Alan had an erection. This didn’t surprise me. He spread his arms and leant forward, balancing himself against the recumbent stone. I shook Alan’s prick vigorously, then ran my tongue along its length. Alan groaned and the volume of his moaning increased when I sucked his cock into my mouth. I worked my lips gently up and down the shaft for quite some time and although Alan bawled his lungs out, he didn’t come. I decided to use my teeth. The harder I chomped the more Alan writhed and screamed. As he came I could see a plane taking off from the runway beneath us. After this, we swapped places and Alan licked me out.

Eventually we got back in the car and Alan drove down to the airport. We went into the terminal and ordered cappuccinos from a concession called Deli France. Aberdeen has a disproportionate number of French-style eateries because people with money to burn seem to consider brasseries sophisticated. The service in Deli France was lousy, the coffee wasn’t bad. After Alan made a purchase in the whisky shop we headed to the car. It only took 15 minutes to get back to the city centre. We high tailed it to Alan’s flat. He got out a Polaroid and made me act out his sexual fantasies with the ventriloquist’s dummy. The poses were pretty similar to those we’d struck in front of the professional photographer in Stonehaven. This time, however, books were obsessively rearranged on the shelves behind Dudley and me. Works by writers such as B. S. Johnson and Alain Robbe-Grillet were reordered as I threw generic pouts and acted out pornographic clichés in front of the camera. As he felt the sticky heat of the paperbacks with his palms, Alan told me that he found books extremely erotic. They made him want to shit in his pants.

After a while Alan threw the dummy across the room. He was feeling jealous. Then my companion started throwing books around. He tried to play football with
Aren’t You Rather Young to Be Writing your Memoirs
by B. S. Johnson. All the while Alan ranted about the irresolvable ambiguity of Johnson’s work. According to Alan, Johnson made such ridiculous claims for his prose that it was hard to believe anyone had ever taken him seriously. Johnson’s theoretical explanation of his output fell behind the premises on which his work was based. Alan considered Johnson to be simultaneously tedious and hilarious. He began ranting about the publicity generated by Johnson’s relationship with his mother, Johnson’s desire for his mother to appreciate his books. Johnson’s obsession with his mother. Alan denounced Johnson for Oedipalising literature. He bemoaned the fact that an incredible technical ability had been fettered by Johnson’s strait-laced mind. Alan denounced Harry Mathews and Raymond Queneau for suffering from the same vice.
⁵
Then he announced that Georges Perec was the only OULIPO writer he rated. Eventually I got Alan to calm down. We had a dram, then retired to bed and had sex. Straight sex. Missionary position. Despite the fact that Alan was into virtually every erotic variation known to man, he always insisted that the highest of highs was post-coital sex. For Alan sex was primarily a mental phenomenon and he wished to exhaust himself with it.

That night I dreamt that we picked up Alan’s Fiesta from the airport car park and drove through the night to the Cambridgeshire village of Hilton. The rosy fingers of dawn were breaking through the clouds as we walked across the village green, which was allegedly landscaped by Capability Brown. An ancient turf maze was our goal and we walked the nine circuits of this unicursal labyrinth to reach the William Sparrow monument at its centre. Retracing our steps, we made our way out of the maze and lay down on the green. One thing led to another and it wasn’t long before we were making love in the dew. My pleasant dreams vanished and I awoke because the bed was shaking. I could feel hot breath on my face and I forced my eyes open. Alan was bending over the bed, adjusting the sheeting, he’d laid the dummy down beside me. I wanted to cry out but my voice caught in my throat. Moonlight was filtering through the undrawn curtains and I could see Alan’s eyes, they were closed. He was sleepwalking.

Alan straightened up and left the room. Gingerly I lowered my legs over the edge of the bed. I followed Alan into the living room. He was shuffling books. Feeling the hot surfaces. Reading paperback tomes with his fingers. All the while reciting random lines corrupted from Shakespeare. Put out the light. Not all the perfumes of Arabia. I thought about waking Alan. Then I remembered I’d read somewhere that it can be dangerous to disturb sleepwalkers. I left him with his crime novels and went through to the kitchen to get a glass of water. By the time I’d slaked my thirst and returned to the living room Alan was gone. I found him in his bed embracing the dummy. I lifted the duvet and climbed in beside them. This woke Alan. Instantly awake, he unceremoniously tossed the dummy to the floor and embraced me. Our lips met, I could feel Alan’s erection through my nightie.

Alan was in no rush to fuck me, he wanted to make sure I was properly lubricated before entering my cunt. So he ran his hands over my body, tweaking my nipples and teasing me by brushing his hands close by my quim without touching my clitoris. Alan was an experienced older man. I’ve never met anyone who made love with such scientific deliberation. Every stroke told to the uttermost. He slowly drew out his prick until the tip of the glans only rested between my lips, and then with equal deliberation drove it slowly back, making its ridge press firmly against the upper creases of my vagina as it passed into my cunt. Then when the whole length was enclosed and it seemed as if even my belly had been filled by it, Alan gently worked it about from side to side, causing the big round head to rub deliciously on the sensitive mouth of my womb. In my ecstasy I was bellowing obscenities. Then we both groaned with excess of pleasure, and my cunt tingled round his palpitating tool as the life flood darted from the opposite sources of delight in reciprocating streams of unctuous spunk.

Alan lay back to recover his breath and rest himself after these exertions. When he saw me wiping my wet receiver with a tissue, he asked me to perform the same kind office for him. I willing complied, and kneeling at his side took his soft and moistened prick into my hands and tenderly wiped it all round, then stooping forward I pressed my lips on its flowing tip. This position elevated my behind and Alan proceeded at once to avail himself of it. Throwing my nightie over my back, he moved me towards him until my naked posterior was almost opposite his face. Then spreading my thighs, he opened the lips of my quim with his fingers, played about the clitoris, and having moistened his finger in my cunt, pushed it into my arsehole. While Alan tickled the crannies and fissures of my backside, I fondled his prick and moulded his balls. After a while I straddled directly over him, then stooped until my sex rested on his mouth. I was dripping as I felt his warm breath blowing aside the hairs of my cunt, and his pliant tongue winding round my clitoris, playing between my nymphae and exploring the secret passage inside. When he went on to the nether entrance, and I felt the titillation of his tongue amid its sensitive creases, the sluices of pleasure burst open and I became conscious of a melting sensation.

I twisted my rump and expanded the wrinkles in my arsehole to let Alan’s tongue further in. I took the head and shoulders of his prick into my mouth and sucked with all my force, screwing my tongue around its indented neck and all the while, moulding his balls with one hand and frigging his arse with the other. Alan began to heave his loins up and down, driving his manhood in and out of my mouth as if he were fucking it. His pole grew larger, stronger and hotter. I felt his open mouth in my cunt sipping up the pleasure drops that trickled down its excited folds. Finally, a torrent of hot spunk, luscious and sweet, burst into my mouth and flowed down my throat. I twisted around and soon we were asleep in each other’s arms. I dreamt of crop circles, shooting stars and forbidden books. Alan whispered in my ears that he could never remember his dreams. I didn’t believe him. He wanted to lose his subjectivity, wreak crystal revenge, but his fatal strategy hadn’t reached fruition yet.

FOUR

CRAWLING UP
slowly from a deep pit of sleep, my body pinned beneath Alan’s weight. His chest pressing down against my back. Alan’s cock between my legs as I negotiated the twilight zone between consciousness and oblivion. After Alan came he struggled up through tangled sheets. I could feel Alan’s residue dripping between my legs. Alan left the door open and I heard him pissing. The sound of water being splashed on his face. When I heard the kettle boil I got up. I washed, dressed, made my way through to the kitchen. Alan threw a copy of
Intellectuals
by Paul Johnson onto the table and poured me a cup of tea from the pot. He made some cryptic comments about Johnson’s career resembling that of a hack called J. C. Squire.

Alan didn’t like Johnson’s
Intellectuals.
He read out a passage from Marx that Johnson claimed was meaningless and then provided an exegesis. Alan didn’t like writers who treated their readers as if they were morons. Johnson was providing an ultra-low-grade introduction to the works of everyone from Rousseau to Sartre, before proceeding to concentrate on what he perceived to be the sexual failings of his subjects. The chapter on Marx was typical. Johnson claimed the author of
Capital
was unable to sustain himself over the entire length of a book, but
Intellectuals
was simply a series of poorly drawn prose sketches that could be detached from each other without any alteration to their meaning. Rather than developing an argument, Johnson simply reiterated his irrational prejudice against critical thinking in a series of poorly schematised chapters. Johnson claimed that Marx was essentially Talmudic in his writings, that he ‘merely’ provided a critique of the work of others. The same argument could have been deployed against Johnson had he risen to the level of critical discourse. As for Johnson’s sex life, the less said about that the better.

Alan got up and left the room. When he returned he handed me a copy of
Karl Marx: His Life and Work
by Otto Rühle. This tome, Alan explained as he fried some mushrooms, may have been marred by cheap psychologising but it had the merit of moving beyond the sterile arguments usually found in the prose of those who wanted to defend the work of Marx. Rühle was an influential left-communist who as far back as the 20s happily admitted Marx had personal faults galore. This, alongside texts such as
The Struggle against Fascism Begins with the Struggle against Bolshevism
, had made Rühle unpopular with right-wing reactionaries such as Lenin and Trotsky. Rather than attempting to defend Marx’s personal failings, Rühle ingeniously claimed that these character flaws were what enabled the communist theoretician to carry out his important work on behalf of the proletariat.

Alan placed a plate in front of me. Spread across it were two slices of toast, one covered with beans, the other with fried mushrooms. Alan sat down at the other end of the table and we tucked into this fare. Once we’d cleaned our plates, Alan asked me whether I’d rather go to Dundee or Bennachie. At that point I didn’t know that Bennachie was a mountain. Since Alan insisted I make a choice I decided to flip a coin. Once fate had directed us south to Dundee, Alan told me to examine the coin I’d grabbed from the kitchen window sill. I turned it over in my hands, both sides bore a head. Fate was pushing me in the direction of one of the least attractive towns in Scotland, which had been rebranded ‘City of Discovery’ by a local council desperate to attract tourists.

Once I’d belted up and we were heading out of Aberdeen over the Brig o’ Dee, I found myself fiddling with the Fiesta’s glove compartment. I opened it up and pulled out a stack of books,
Head Injuries
by Conrad Williams,
Cocaine Nights
by J. G. Ballard,
Perfumed Head
by Steve Beard,
Come
by Mark Waugh (‘CD limited edition’ with the CD detached from the package) and
Been Down so Long It Looks Like up to Me
, ‘the classic novel of the 1960s’, by Richard Farina. We were speeding down the A90 with Portlethen flashing by on the left. I didn’t know it then, but there were a number of impressive stone circles just to our right, at least one of which is visible from the road. I asked Alan about the books. He said he’d been meaning to dump them at the Old Aberdeen Bookshop. I could tell Alan was in a bad mood, he was usually more reticent about broadcasting his opinions but that morning he was indulging himself with a torrent of abuse. I guessed, incorrectly as it turned out, that Alan would have preferred Bennachie to Dundee as a destination.