Friction (21 page)

As Frank and Steve enter Carly's ward, Frank speeds off ahead in the direction of the poor victim of his incredible machine. The fat bastard can't contain his excitement; his jacket flaps about him as if he might be in danger of flight. He pours himself over Carly. Smiling, pointed, questioning eyes.

‘How are you, my sweet, sweet child?' says the terribly fat bastard.

‘I'm fine, Frank,' says Carly, the victim of the sex machine's love.

‘You're a naughty girl opening Steve's post like that. What were you thinking?'

‘I was bored, Frank, you know, I'm always so bored.'

Steve appears at the end of the bed. This isn't the first time he's visited, of course, but they're yet to have a proper conversation. He stares at Carly until her eyes are forced to wander from Frank's face and meet his own yellow gaze.

‘Nice hat, Steve,' shrieks Carly, an unfortunate mania affecting her voice.

Steve blinks nervously. He's so anxious about his clothes. They must be in fashion, he reassures himself, I only bought them this morning. He composes a smile, a cool one that
alludes to his financial brain and able cock. He takes a deep breath: ‘Carly, do you really like my hat?'

But Carly doesn't answer. Her healed and healthy hand leaps from the bed in the direction of Frank's. Frank's hands look like cow's udders. ‘Listen to me, Frank,' Carly shrieks again, ‘where did you get that machine? It's better than the Relentless Bliss.'

‘I hadn't realised you were a connoisseur.' Frank smiles, the sort of smile that businessmen perform when a punter has fallen for their product. ‘Let me guess, you didn't like the clit fizzer?'

‘Well, I liked it, of course, but it was nothing compared to your machine!'

At the end of the bed, Steve's heart leaks down into his stomach then onwards into his bowels. It continues though his intestine, then drips down the bones and ligaments of his right leg and into his feet, and then to his shoes. It seeps though the rubber soles of his moccasins, and finally comes to rest, bloody and beating on the hospital floor. Someone ought to call a doctor.

‘Well, you'll be pleased to know, my dear, that your boyfriend and I stand to make a great deal of money from that machine. Do you suppose all girls will like it as much as you?'

‘I love it. It will be loved.' Carly pauses and looks down at her body, still wrapped in bandages, but mending, healing calmly, returning to perfection. She turns to Steve, who's staring at the floor, to where his broken heart still beats. ‘Steve,' asks Carly, ‘have you cleaned the machine yet? Like I asked.'

‘No,' says Steve, nudging his heart self-consciously with his shoe. ‘No, it's still covered in your blood.'

Steve removes his cap and prods his hair into a heartstoppingly fashionable shape. But something is dying. A way of life is being stretched and tortured. He holds his cap as if in mourning. His hair and his distressed jeans are suddenly a source of shame, his status is being flushed down the toilet, is circling round and round in dirty water, preparing itself for the sewers.

‘He's so precious, is he not, Carly?' Frank interjects. ‘He can't bear the idea of a machine doing a better job than he himself.'

‘I used to think I could change the world,' says Steve, for the second time this week. Frank looks at Steve with sympathy, sensing that society may well be changing and that Steve may well be a casualty of this change. He attempts but fails to change the subject.

‘What do you know of this website, newsex.biz? Some guy and his girlfriend are documenting their efforts to partake in every single kind of sex. It's the talk of every brothel in the city. I thought the girl could be a useful guinea pig, what with her refined tastes.'

Carly's and Steve's faces are blank. Almost featureless.

‘I mean I could offer the machine to my whore friends,' continues Frank, ‘but they're all so numb to new experience and sceptical of orgasm. Unless it's with their dreadful boyfriends . . . “Sorry, Frank,” they say to me, “I save my arse for my boyfriend.” My God, the times I've heard that sentence. Will they never relinquish their cherubic arsehole, uncork it like a fine wine . . .?'

Frank trails off, distracted by some invisible object that seems to be hovering inches from his fat nose; an invisible arse, perhaps. Steve takes this opportunity to walk round the bed and kneel at Carly's side.

‘Will you be coming back to the flat, Carly?'

Carly shuffles awkwardly, turning to meet the gaze of her fashionable boyfriend. ‘They let me out tomorrow. I guess I'll come back, I'll need to see the machine for one.' As she says this, the colour of Steve's skin seems to fade, as if he's shedding the top layers of his bogus tan.

‘And me for two, right?' he says.

‘Yeah, yeah.'

Would anyone care, wonders Steve, if I was to pinch a scalpel and slice Carly's face off with it? Would anyone really care, if I was exceptionally quick? Then I could stab her a thousand times in the heart, the thousandth lunge as committed and lethal as the first. I want to spill my beautiful lover's guts, pound her until she's a revolting stain.

The invisible arse in front of Frank's nose disappears and he comes to his senses like a flock of seagulls flapping into flight.

‘Come, come, my sweets, don't argue. Steve, I do need you to clean the machine. No girl will try it if it's covered in Carly's blood. I need to get it to this girl at newsex.biz. She's local, it won't be difficult.'

‘Would you just shut the fuck up, Frank?' asks Steve, back at the end of the bed, stuffing his heart back into place.

‘Oh, Steve. How unkind. You look unwell, rather grey. Let's leave. Carly, I wish you a speedy recovery, I will send your regards to the machine.'

‘Make sure you do, Frank . . . and Frank – thank you.'

Steve is a house built too close to the sea. Year after year, the waves work away at the cliff beneath him, burrowing into the rock. It takes time, but eventually the house falls; the ground gives way and the house slumps downwards, bricks and masonry falling into the sea. No one dies. The
inhabitants are warned and leave in good time. Steve is doomed, vacated, preparing to drop.

Along the corridor from Carly's ward a mop moves about the beige floor in slow figures of eight, steered by Colin. He looks up from his work and notices a fat man and a tall, attractive guy making for the lift. Colin must try to take care of his rage.

News travels fast among the emergency services and quickly works its way down to the hospital cleaners. Carly, the girl who almost died from mechanical sex, has become quite a celebrity among the doctors, nurses and the lesser staff of the hospital. Colin mops his way carefully along the corridor to view the beast.

Colin hasn't seen Boy 1 or Boy 2 in a while. Last he heard of Boy 1 was that he'd split his foreskin shagging his sofa, but that remains unconfirmed. Colin has been in his room, liaising with the rat and perfecting his sexual needs. He thinks often of what Deaks said to him that night in the Wishing Well, about the feeling of fucking the already fucked. He hadn't spoken to him since. He'd seen him around the Antenatal Ward and noticed the knowing glances he exchanged with the women, but that was it. Melissa gave birth a week or so ago. Colin spoke to one of the doctors about her, enquired about her health. She was fine and so was her kid.

After that night with Melissa, everything changed. Colin has discovered new and minimal ways of surviving on his part-time wage from the hospital. He has given up drinking, no longer goes out. He buys what clothes he still needs from charity shops. His time is spent in his room, which continues to rot. The rodents have multiplied. They have
heard of his hospitality, scurried in for the winter and taken up residence amid the decay. Colin lives entirely on rice and peas. He never smokes, never masturbates. There is a calm about him. There is an unnerved subsistence, and a sense that he is preparing for chaos.

The volume has finally been turned down. The motion slowed. The women of winter are of little distraction, wrapped as they are in thick coats, fake furs and wool. But no, in truth, women don't concern Colin at all, because they are already lost. Men, too. Lost at birth.

Colin refuses to iron his clothes because smooth clothes are not necessary. He refuses to kick balls or throw stones and he refuses to run. Colin refuses to smile, refuses to cry or be angry, refuses to wank his cock, to say hello. He refuses the media, refuses to crane his neck, refuses women and men, refuses to thank the helpful or punish the rude. He refuses to be questioned or answer, to consume, refuses his phone and his mail, refuses his friends, his past, refuses to hear the drunken singing in the night, the gossip in the streets, the sirens and the laughs. Colin categorically refuses to die.

Colin has only one ambition: he wishes to make secret, unseen lives. He wants to make minuscule hearts beat unheard in vacuumed spaces. He wants to create uninterrupted biological constructions; secret configurations of nature that operate unbeknownst to people and their dismal working-out of things. Put simply, he wants to impregnate women and abort the child.

He mops to the doorway of Carly's ward and peers cautiously through the open door. The room is too white, like an unused plate. Carly lies spotlit flicking through a magazine, nails painted nosebleed red.

Colin can just make out the colour of skin on the front cover of Carly's magazine, airbrushed and eggshell-like. Belonging to some famous person, a life turned professional. It's not a photograph of a person, it can't be. It is a photograph of a photograph of a photograph of a photograph of a photograph; an endless regression of captured images that continues infinitely, until the subject of the first photo is no longer understood, and seems devoid of humanity and sense. Something arbitrary, something forgotten.

Colin stares at Carly, watching the slight changes of direction in her eyes as she scans the different pages. She spends only moments on each page, like she's blessed with superhuman reading skills and is hurrying through some great work, just so she can say she's read it. The girl with painted nails who was ripped to shreds by a sex machine. The girl who tied her hair into a ponytail before she spoke to her visitors. Breaking a personal silence of what must be days, Colin steps into the doorway and speaks in a thick Mancunian accent.

‘What do you remember, girl?' he says, his eyes like marbles containing small strips of white ribbon.

‘What?' says Carly, bending the pages of her magazine to one side.

‘What kinds of things do you remember?'

‘Get lost,' blares Carly, her mouth a drunken circle of soft, purple lip. By the door, Colin winces and places a hand into his brown, overgrown hair.

‘I remember nothing,' he says. ‘I've just mopped a floor, I must have – why else would I be holding a mop?'

‘Can you fucking believe this?' Carly appeals to an elderly lady in an adjacent bed. As she does so, Colin disappears,
begins mopping the remainder of the corridor in slow figures of eight.

It's late by the time Colin returns home to the rats and the room of dark dirt. But what of time? He heats some rice and peas in a pan and takes it to the bedroom, greeted by the familiar sound of small claws scratching at wood. This is a situation, no question it is. A room infested with rodents and debris, lit by a solitary bulb which hangs from the ceiling like a noose. And Colin is in transit, as humans are. He inhabits a succession of moments that alter him and help him to understand the precise nature of his regrets. He lifts a forkful of rice to his mouth, and bites.

The night with Melissa helped to reveal the more precise characteristics of his sexual desires. It wasn't the form of the pregnant women that was so captivating, he realised in retrospect. The large bellies and the manner in which they are carried is all incidental, all part of a far greater beauty which he has been unable to forget: the beauty of a life that has barely been interfered with at all. A life that never sees the light of day. Foetuses do not paint their nails. They do not speak shit or think shit. They don't go to bars and fight and drink too much. They float, alone. A foetus has never been spotted propping up a bar, reading a magazine, sipping Bacardi and Coke through a straw.

So what if human life never saw the light of day? thinks Colin. It would be perfect. It would be brief, of course, a matter of weeks or months, but at least it would be untouched by the withering boredoms and the dull dangers of society. This idea has draped itself over Colin's brain like a hot towel. Finally, a meaning to sex, a meaning at last. The creation of short, perfect life.

It's been four days since he posted the message on Justin's site – newsex.biz. He's yet to hear any reply. But he needs help, needs conspirators, fellow believers. Women who will agree.

A rat is lured out from underneath the wardrobe by the smell of steamed rice and peas. It noses the corner of a pizza box for a moment before staring up at Colin through the blue light. Colin stares into the rat's small black face. Vermin, he thinks, I'll be happy at last.

MEMORY LOSS IS
a terrible thing. Particularly if it coincides with waking up in an unknown environment and being told extremely large lies. As Johnny's eyes open there is a brief moment of calm and something vaguely akin to happiness. Memory loss does this to you. Your lack of any concrete idea of what happened the previous night somehow gives you the impression that you were happy and did something worthwhile. But this feeling quickly fades. It fades as Johnny tries to work out why there is a copy of
Crime and Punishment
on his bedside table, then a little more when he realises that neither it, the bed nor the table beside it actually belong to him.

That's when your brain notices what a state it's in. It notices the shattered glass, the strange stains and the empty bottles that are littered all about your skull. That's when the guilt strikes, the massive fear. What the fuck happened? Johnny rolls over and sees Justin and Rebecca sleeping in
each other's arms beside him. Oh, what? What the fuck happened?