Friction (20 page)

There is hope on the horizon, however; a gloriously smudged sun full of purples, yellows and blues. The hope relates to Justin's firm belief that he can meet, seduce and shag a celebrity. Rebecca is coming round to the idea, too. She's beginning to realise what an enormous goal it is. What the possibilities and the potential findings might be. Incredible. Shagging a celebrity is like shagging a unicorn, or shagging Helen of Troy or Zeus. It's like shagging the Virgin Mary, Joseph, Jesus, God. It would be glorious, a biblical gang-bang.

Rebecca and Justin don't exchange words on the way home. The heater is on full; it's incredibly stuffy. They arrive back at Rebecca's flat at about eleven thirty. As they approach the front door, the sound of a warm and gentle sobbing can be heard, like a mouse singing softly. They follow the sound. It's coming from a pile of clothes and body that has been deposited on the doorstep of Rebecca's flat. The pile of clothes and body is drenched in rain and flinches intermittently.

‘Who the fuck is this?' asks Justin, delivering a light kick to the wet bundle.

‘It's Johnny, Justin, this is Johnny,' says Rebecca.

Yes, it is Johnny, and he's hammered. He rolls clumsily on to his back and stares up at Justin, like an unarmed character in a film preparing to be riddled with point-blank bullets. His face is wet and red, as if he's not made of skin and bone but of a more malleable solution. Silicone or blubber, milky porridge. His eyes are dots, drawn quickly with a Biro.

‘Hell . . . o.' Johnny's Biro eyes disappear, recoiling swiftly into the mush of his face.

‘He's drunk, let's get him inside.'

Johnny doesn't notice being picked up. He's not aware of being lifted in Justin's arms and carried to the living room. He feels the warmth of the house, the gold light, the soft furnishings, the distant sound of Rebecca's deep, concerned voice. But his thoughts are of childhood games: hide and seek, ping pong, tig.

‘Nice house,' slurs Johnny, as crystals of yellow and red rotate before his eyes. He's fucked. He spent the afternoon sipping lager in his bedroom, spent the evening sipping vodka in numerous hideous bars.

‘Where's the experiment? Where is the sex?' he demands, because he wants to have sex and wants to know about the experiment. He is a small piece of paper, dropped from a balcony on a windless day. He flutters and turns like a quickly winking eye, slowly making his way down through stationary air. Then he lands. Content. Then he is violently sick all over his chest.

‘Fuck this, Rebecca. I'm not cleaning him up. I'm going to make a call.'

Justin watches Rebecca as she begins to scrape and scoop at the sick on Johnny's jacket. He runs his hands through his hair and suddenly wishes it was shaved again. Can you imagine a simple life? he asks himself. Basic actions. Solid sex. Interesting thoughts. Energy. What a joke. He watches as Johnny embarks on an untimely squirm; vomit runs on to the upholstery, eager to stain.

In the hall, Justin picks up the telephone and punches in a number. In the living room, Rebecca and Johnny play about with sick, half listening to half a conversation.

‘Hello? . . . All right, mate, you know that film premiere
you're working on? . . . No, no, it's cool. I'm not bothered about the film, but who's going to be at the after party? . . . Which celebrities? Anyone famous? . . . Really? . . . Fuck . . . You've gotta get me some tickets, I may need as many as six . . .'

Johnny's clothes are almost clean. What little vomit remains will grow crusty overnight and be brushed off in the morning. Rebecca removes his jacket. His mustard polo shirt is full of rainwater and must be removed as well.

‘Johnny, stand up, I need to get you out of your clothes,' she says, tugging at his top.

‘Oh, finally, Rebecca . . . finally . . . it's happiness, isn't it?'

‘No, no, Johnny, it's just that you'll catch cold.'

‘Oh, finally . . . happiness and Rebecca.'

Rebecca shrugs, her eyeballs do a loop-the-loop. She could swear that for a second she was staring through the darkness of her skull at her own brain, and that it looked rather fed up. She pulls Johnny's shirt off his back and undoes his belt with a click of her fingers. A sharp pull and his trousers are removed too. She's about to place the garments on the radiator when she notices the scent of urine and semen crawling like an exotic insect from Johnny's underpants. Her nostrils flare.

‘Jesus, Johnny. You stink.'

‘Just be gentle with me, Rebecca, go slow, please go slow.'

This is another tremendous moment in time. Johnny stands in the centre of the room, swaying as if under the influence of a mysterious indoor wind. Wearing only his boxer shorts, the ungodly nature of his body is revealed in all its spotted, stooping glory. His endless legs, crooked and
splattered in entirely random hedges of horrible black hair. His chest is concaved like a half-dug swimming pool, abandoned due to sudden and shocking bankruptcy. His poor feet. His thin arms. His regrettable face.

Justin appears in the doorway. ‘What are you doing, Rebecca?' he asks.

‘We're going to make love, you stupid Justin,' says Johnny, bending at the knees and waving a poorly clenched fist at Justin. ‘We shall make true love . . . Rebecca and I . . . true love!'

Justin ignores Johnny completely and looks at Rebecca. ‘Are you going to shag Johnny, Rebecca?' he asks.

‘No, I am not,' shouts Rebecca. ‘I'm trying to dry his clothes.'

‘Are you sure?'

‘Yes,' she says, holding up the wet bundle.

‘Then why has he got an erection?'

‘He hasn't.'

‘He has,' says Justin, pointing at Johnny, ‘look!'

Rebecca follows Justin's finger to the jumbled contents of Johnny's underpants which have indeed stiffened. ‘Oh, yeh, so he has.'

Tears leak from Johnny's eyes. His entire face is waterlogged, fit to burst. His cock tents his kecks, points at thin air. A melancholy erection, dwarfed by the room and the moment. The three people stand in silence as the world composes itself. Time, once again, spares the blushes of humanity by passing. Johnny speaks.

‘Who was it that called life life? And couldn't they have called it something else, like shit?'

Rebecca places a hand on Johnny's mossy back. Poor Johnny. She guides him upstairs to bed and tucks him in carefully, brushing the last dried-up molecules of sick from
his lips and his cheek. The lids of his eyes droop slowly, like blankets being draped over particularly unsightly corpses. Johnny fumbles a glimpse of Rebecca in her underwear before sleep takes hold irresistibly, like the ending of some world.

Rebecca secretly squirts Johnny's groin and chest with perfume. There is a brief battle between the scent of pissy semen and the scent of roses. The scent of roses wins, assisted by unknown chemical compounds invented to make women smell more like women.

Rebecca lies beside Johnny, wide awake, listening to the noises of Justin downstairs; the dull thumps and the clicks. She remembers the motorway lay-by and how he'd called her beautiful and wonderful. But where do words come from? And how much do people truly care for their meanings? We must take care of the meanings of words, thinks Rebecca, control them if we can. Beautiful and wonderful. Personality. Sexuality. Justin. Perhaps he is honest, his frank ambition to explore the mythology of sex, perhaps this is what honesty looks like. But what of love?

She stares straight up at the ceiling. She imagines the night sky filled entirely with stars, no darkness whatsoever, just millions and millions of distant suns shining next to one another. Would such a situation fill the world with romance? Would we all give in to the apparent beauty of the blinding natural light, and somehow desire to love? No, she concludes with a quick blink of her eyes, we'd probably continue to fight. I think, she thinks, that Justin is beautiful and wonderful.

Time elapses quietly out of respect for those who wish to sleep. It's approaching one o'clock when Justin slinks into the bedroom and begins to remove his clothes. He is
close to being a completely silent human. There's just the sound of the mattress groaning as Justin gets into bed beside Johnny. Who gurgles distantly. Then there is the sound of whispering, as hushed electrical currents travel between the boy and the girl.

‘Rebecca?' whispers Justin.

‘Yeah?' she replies.

‘We're sleeping with Johnny tonight, then?'

‘So it seems.'

‘What's that smell?'

‘It's a mixture of perfume, semen, urine, me and you.'

‘OK.'

Justin carefully liberates a pillow from under Johnny's head and turns over so his eyes look out at the wall, away from the smells.

‘Justin?' whispers Rebecca.

‘Yeh?'

‘Are you OK?'

‘I'm OK. Are you OK?'

‘I'm OK.'

In a daring act of nocturnal manipulation, Rebecca climbs over Johnny and nudges him over to the side of the bed she had just occupied. ‘Can you hold me tight?' she asks, placing a hand on Justin's stomach. Justin embraces Rebecca. His arms collar her neck. Her face is ground into his chest. His whispering is a soft, warm breeze.

‘I checked the website just now,' he says. ‘A guy's gone on suggesting a new idea. It might be a pregnancy fetish, I'm not sure. His name's Colin and he's left a number.'

‘Will you call?'

‘Dunno, maybe. I need to concentrate on the celebrity project, we're halfway there I think. There's a few TV stars
going to this premiere next week. I can get us in, but after that I'm not sure. I might need to rent out some of the girls from the Nude Factory.'

‘They'd be up for it,' says Rebecca, wishing that each moment of intimacy didn't have to include the discussion of some laborious sexual mission. ‘Hold me tight,' she demands, mid-yawn.

Their breathing slows down and Justin's arm begins to go dead. Memories of his old girlfriends can-can through his head. All the girls that he's lain beside. The rituals that are repeated without ever acknowledging the fact that it's been done before, intimately, with someone else, in almost exactly the same ways. Is it a lie or simply what human beings need and do? Is it wrong that we so expertly remember to forget, and allow the ancient to masquerade as the new?

‘I don't want a girlfriend,' whispers Justin, his voice note-less, just breath, like the sound of two different airs passing though each other.

‘Yes, I know,' says Rebecca, buried to her nose in sleep. Then a silence, a silence which seems to promote the idea of more noise, of more whispering. But there is no more noise, just sleep. Three young people, out like lights. Justin is the last to fall.

‘LET'S WALK,' SAYS
Frank, his tanned cheeks lifting into a smile like two large, brown drapes. He's back from Japan and fatter than ever. He is a boat, a schooner. His blazer comprises enormous expanses of grey fabric.

‘Doesn't winter happen in Japan, Frank?' enquires Steve, envious of his colleague's tanned skin.

‘Oh, yes, my boy, it was freezing. My tan is fake. That whorehouse down in Burnage has just got a sunbed – it's a regular little country club.'

Steve and Frank turn off Whitworth Street and on to Oxford Road. It's been three days since Carly's accident and they're off to the hospital to pay her a visit. Steve sports the most contemporary elements of his wardrobe: a red tweed flat cap, a pair of white moccasins and a fitted denim jacket. There is no chance that his decisions can be reversed; he will not return to his studies, he will not stop lifting weights and the beautiful girl must always be his. So this morning he visited a salon and had his hair coloured and cut into fantastical geometric proportions. After all, the
Sex Machine doesn't have a fashionable haircut. How could it? Nor can it be fashionably attired, because it can't go shopping and the clothes won't fit. Ha, he thinks, as a passing brunette catches his eye. I shall win Carly back. I shall. The machine will lose to me, to man, to fashion.

‘So let me get this straight in my head,' begins Frank, stuffing a circular mint into his mouth. ‘Carly was using the machine when she fell into the coffee table in some kind of fit of ecstasy, right?'

‘So it seems.'

‘Brilliant news, Steve, my boy. We're rich. And that table wasn't very tasteful now, was it?'

It's noon and the air tastes like freshly squeezed orange juice. A white light winter day. No wind whatsoever. Frank can't help rubbing his hands together like a cartoon millionaire. His trip to Japan appears to have yielded results.

‘Autopen sales are already beginning to level out. The clit thing isn't to everybody's taste, what's it called? The clit fizzer, that's it. Apparently it's a bit feeble, not as good as most vibrators. And the repetitive penetration is just a novelty, certainly not a great source of pleasure. It's purely a replacement for men, and it seems we're hardly worth replacing, haha.'

Steve tuts, his lips vibrate as if he's just jettisoned an invisible jet of saliva on to the pavement in front of him. It's fine for Frank, he's a fat bastard who only screws prostitutes. Steve likes to think of himself as a sexual athlete of Olympic proportions. That's the main reason he changed his life: for the sex and for the fit-as-fuck girls.

Frank is brimming with delight: ‘If Carly's reaction proves to be anything like the norm then I don't see why we can't get to work right away. We can import the things
ourselves. Sell to Versus, Shirley Rivers, sell the things ourselves over the Internet. We just need more evidence, and then we shall need a great deal of publicity.'

Steve begins to feel faintly ridiculous. As if the red cap he purchased this morning might already have drifted out of fashion, and been replaced by something newer and entirely different. Are people laughing? thinks Steve. Must I really make the Sex Machine famous? Must I really be its pimp? That machine. That fucker.