Friction (23 page)

‘You don't have a chance with the cast,' says Rebecca. ‘They've got lines of people waiting to talk to them, even the minor characters.'

‘OK.'

‘But there are still loads to choose from, TV stars mostly. I think some have done film but I couldn't tell you which. I guess it'll only work if you see one you like. Just don't waste time with the cast, we're not going to blow this chance, right? All right, Justin?'

Rebecca is demonstrating that manic and babbling bogus enthusiasm for which women are famous. She refuses to catch Justin's eye, just stares at the neckline of his vest and occasionally at his shoulder or his hair. Justin can only make out the meaning of Rebecca's eyes if he really tries. She loves him. In an adjacent world, he loves her. Yes. On the other side of life, these two are lovers. They are choosing
ingredients in a bright supermarket. They are meeting each other's parents and sharing a bank account. But not on this side. On this side they are personalities in the dark. Blinkered experimenters. Justin looks at Rebecca as he might a fading photograph.

‘Are you OK, Rebecca?'

‘Are you sure you want to do this?'

Justin pauses, sucks liquid through a straw. You can only love once or twice, he maintains. In any case, love is the great Western lie, a white one perhaps, but a lie all the same. He glares. Love is banal, safe. Please let it be so.

‘I hate society, you know? I hate almost everything about it,' he says.

‘I don't want a boyfriend. Haha.'

‘No, listen to me. I hate society.' Justin throws a fag into his mouth and watches impatiently as Rebecca's eyes begin to plead.

‘Please don't do this, Justin. Please,' she says. ‘Let's go home. Don't do it.'

1, 2, 3, 4.

‘I have to.'

He walks forward past her exposed shoulder, which seems dissected by the thin green strap of her dress. As he passes by, he notices, out of the corner of his eye, Rebecca's head, bowing slowly towards the ground. Too much cinema, he thinks, way too much cinema in the world. Love is the white lie of the West, he chants, love is the white lie of the West. He places a hand on the shoulder of the bouncer and assembles a devastating smile. He produces his ticket and is shepherded into the VIP area, to the astonishment of the herd.

As he enters, the six strippers prick their ears, their eyes
suck like syringes. Justin pauses and smiles. He arches his neck slightly, then sips at his drink. That was a good sip, elegant and controlled. Great sip, great start. As planned, Sidney is the first girl to approach. He watches as she carefully avoids the gropes of a group of middle-aged men and makes her way over to him.

‘Oh my God, Rudolf de la Hooting, it's an honour to meet you. I loved the film.'

She leans in and kisses the air either side of his face. The name is a bad one. Justin realised this as soon as Sidney said it. Nobody is called de la Hooting. But what do celebrities know? The two of them move to the bar, where Justin pays four hundred pounds for a bottle of 1986 Margaux. There is a commotion as the wine is sought. A cellar door slams. One by one, the incognito strippers congregate around Justin. The minor celebrities begin to stare.

The celebrity is, in essence, a gentle species. Doomed to teeter on the perimeters of reality, about which little is known for sure. The celebrity walks a tightrope. On one side lies the valley of mortality, where the living dwell. On the other lies a steep ravine, immortality, where the dead scramble at the rocky slopes and are eternally known.

Justin pays attention to each of the strippers, nodding and smiling calm asymmetrical smiles. In this comparatively overdressed state, the girls are a delight, convincing beauties. At least two, Sidney included, are so fit that they actually deserve to be real celebrities, seriously, they do.

‘So what do you reckon, de la Hooting? Seen a celeb you like the look of?' Sidney whispers into Justin's ear, the blubbered curves of her fake tits sighing into her dress.

‘I don't know. Did Rebecca come in?'

‘She's angry with you.'

‘Why? Because I'm going to shag someone famous?'

Towards the back of the room there is a round of crap laughter, like children imitating Gatling gunfire. Justin's eyes scan the room, searching for a face he recognises, a face that has sneaked into his mind and pissed on the carpet. Eventually he spots the victim, located just across the room, no more than ten feet away. She's standing at a slight angle, looking up at a black man in sunglasses. That's her, he thinks, she's fit and I know her face.

‘Got one,' he says, moving Sidney to one side in order to get a better look at his prey. Sidney's been talking, whispering into Justin's ear about Rebecca, how she's not sure about the experiment any more and feels she might be falling in love with Justin. But what of such nonsense? Love is the white lie of the West. Justin scrawls the words on the inside of his eyelids in lines of light. He blinks, then stares at the celebrity. Are her tits real?

If the company of the famous is to be kept, then new senses are required. It's an entirely novel mode of being alive. There is no use in smelling and hearing; seeing is secondary. Never make the mistake of trusting your senses in the presence of the known. It is a culture of awareness and appreciation. Everybody can be seen, not everybody can be famous. The air is battery acid, energetic but reliant on successful currents, introductions, charmed hellos, chains and buzzing circuits of power. These people don't pay, don't listen or give a shit. They tell stories, they brag, laud, frightfully anticipate the next new thing.

‘Shriek, girls, everybody shriek with laughter, like I'm funny.'

Justin whispers the order to his congregation. The strippers shriek as if Justin has told the greatest joke ever told.
Sidney bends double as if she might be sick into her wine. Jesus, that was funny. Men look over at the hysterical beauties, wishing they could tell jokes of that calibre. That must have been a great joke, they think, wishing to be exactly like Justin.

It works. Her eye is caught. Justin holds tight to it. He's gliding through the crowd of laughing strippers and striding purposefully towards the celebrity. There's nothing like laughter for drawing attention to yourself; it's an advert for happiness. The celebrity glances briefly towards Justin and his entourage, away from the black guy in sunglasses. That's all it takes, one look, eye contact, hope, the nature of the beast.

Justin's walking across the room. The celebrity knows he's coming already. She's composing herself and talking to the black guy with a renewed and exaggerated vigour. The question is, who the fuck is she? Certainly Justin has no idea of the celebrity's name; he doesn't even know her character's name. He suspects she acts in a soap opera, a Merseyside soap opera; that would make sense.

Her hair is brown and shoulder length, touched by faint strips of yellow dye. Her figure is full, breasts peeping out of her maroon dress like targets at a firing range. The celebrity has a delightful face, round eyes, soft nose, comfy pink lips. As Justin smiles at her, he recalls more precisely the nature of her fame. She appears on an early evening soap opera. Her character is sexually manipulative, but capable of love. She supplements her income with modelling, underwear shoots for lad's magazines. She may have even made the front cover. Ha, the bitch, the famous bitch.

‘Hello there, and who might you be?' says Justin, his washed face beaming.

‘I could ask you the same question,' replies the celebrity, its black heart beating.

‘Oh, I'm nobody.'

‘I find that hard to believe.'

‘Perhaps. May I buy you a drink?'

Justin is concise and charming, the glass of wine hangs loose in his finger and his voice swims breast stroke through the air. God. The celebrity spoke. Who would believe it?

As Justin begins his manoeuvres, the black man removes his sunglasses. His eyes are dark brown with a thread of bright white woven around his pupils. He clearly has his own designs on the celebrity. He eyes Justin with irritation. But she is for Justin, that's the way it must be. Justin is suave and detailed, devastating and brave, the experimenter, the winner.

‘My name is Davine, and this is Claude.'

Justin turns to the black guy, Claude, they shake hands and Justin stabs his large head with a shining, sharp, go-fuck-yourself smile.

‘Rudolf. My name is Rudolf. Come and join me at the bar.'

You're beaten, you great big bastard, thinks Justin. Put your sunglasses on and fuck off. Justin places a hand around the celebrity. She draws breath and her chest expands, imprisoning air in her ribcage. Another smile from Justin and Claude is defeated. He retreats, the glass of champagne threatening to shatter between his sausage-meat fingers.

‘Claude choreographed a lot of the battle scenes, you know?'

The celebrity pirouettes, causing Justin's hand to slide around her body, skin speeding over maroon silk, to the top of her arse.

‘No, I didn't know that,' says Justin. ‘To tell you the truth, I haven't seen the film yet.'

‘Oh, so you weren't involved?'

‘Well, not directly, although I paid for most of it.'

Back at the bar, the strippers continue to vie for Justin's attention. At one point, Sidney seems to almost square up to the celebrity. The effect is charming, the celebrity is won. The bottle of wine is finished, another is ordered. The celebrity watches the fifty-pound notes pass over the bar. The celebrity is distracted and vulnerable.

‘Fine wine, my only joy,' jokes Justin as he nimbly avoids the gaping grins of the strippers. They're drunk now and their behaviour is becoming over the top. Justin moves the celebrity to a table, refills its glass and sits down opposite. He offers it a fag, which is accepted. They both smoke. All around the room, biologies begin to give in to the complimentary champagne; the embarrassment of tomorrow is foreshadowed. A woman at the bar impersonates a dog. She barks and bends over, woof, woof. A drink is spilled and an idiot mouths along to the music.

It's not long before Justin is able to negotiate a fairly swift departure. The major celebrities have already left in search of a secret and more elite occasion. The crowd is thinning and the glamour of the event is virtually extinct. But Justin's celebrity still seems interested. It's talking. In fact, it won't be quiet. This is certainly a good sign. Her eyes are animated, probing Justin's face in that way that people do, to demonstrate their interest. Approximately every five minutes she puts both her hands into her hair as if she might be about to peel off her face. This manoeuvre affords Justin about two seconds to spend working out the finer points of her breasts. They are everything you would
expect from famous tits. Hairless and highly marketable, they seem almost laminated for the purpose of masturbation. They glow – a real feature. Maybe, wonders Justin, evolution will work in the same way. Maybe the great tits of the future will develop a kind of laminate, wipe clean finish on them, like skin but even smoother, more like plastic. Bums, too, perhaps. Indeed. People ejaculate on bums all the time. Men. Perspex skin. Finally—

‘Rudolf?'

‘What?'

‘Are you OK?'

The celebrity hasn't shut up in half an hour. The expensive wine is in her blood and making her talk and talk and talk. The alcohol simplifies her, breaks her up into her component parts, pixelates her. Justin imagines her as a viscous puddle on the chair, a gloopy collection of beautiful eyes, lips, tits and rear. If he doesn't do something soon, she will surely talk herself into some kind of mood. Women can do this if allowed to speak for too long while drunk. She'll talk some problem into her head, some melancholy. She must be stopped.

‘Would you be prepared to leave? I find these parties rather dull, don't you?'

She says yes, ha, I promise she does. Yes, says the celebrity, finishing her drink and looking in the direction of the cloakroom. Of course, she says yes. I promise.

Then comes the silence.

Justin and the celebrity sit in the taxi. It is completely silent, although for some reason the celebrity's mouth is moving. In fact, the celebrity is talking. And yet there is only silence. There is no sound in the car, neither the sound of a celebrity's voice, nor the sound of Justin shifting
in his leather seat. Justin burps. Silent. A whiff of wine, but nothing else. The car makes no sound, nor does its driver. Nothing in the street is making any noise either. People shout, but it's as if they're just swallowing large objects, invisible American footballs. The wind is inaudible, the rain too. Absolutely everything makes no sound.

Whatever the celebrity is trying to say, it seems rather dull – no, wait, not dull, erotic perhaps, sultry. Her lips nibble at the air. Perhaps she's talking about sex, or maybe about the misery of her former lovers. An arm drops between her legs, causing her dress to ride up her thighs. She's leaning in towards Justin's face, still mumbling something, mouthing the end of some sentence, trailing off midway perhaps, like lovers sometimes do.

The kiss, too, is silent. Justin waits for that sticky sound as their lips separate, like air being released from sealed Tupperware. But it doesn't come, there is no noise, just the sight of the celebrity adjusting her posture and half-heartedly attempting to straddle him. Justin runs both his hands up her stomach and cups her breasts from below. There is that magical moment as she permits him: yes, it is allowed, my breasts can be yours. And Justin's hands, oh the hands of men, childish and meek, as if all they ever wanted to be was a bra and all the punches and the strangulations were all tragically incidental.

Where is the tapping? This is serious: where is the sound of tapping? In the bridal suite of the hotel the sound of tapping cannot be heard, and it ought to be. Justin is cutting up lines of cocaine on the coffee table. Tapping at the larger blocks with his credit card until they break up, sweeping the powder into neat lines. The celebrity is reclined on the bed. Still talking, Justin imagines. Although, to be sure,
he'd have to turn round and check, to see if her lips are moving.