Friction (6 page)

‘Forgive me, Rebecca, I was joking.'

‘I can't bear boys saying that, using the word “twat”, it's offensive.'

‘Pussy?'

‘Fuck off, Johnny.'

Johnny grabs Rebecca by the shoulder, trying desperately to slow her down. His horrible hand against her delicate skin, it seems so out of place, the result of some alternative and far fouler evolution. The evolution of man; rank in comparison to the laboratorial development of woman.

I only said ‘twat', thinks Johnny, that's funny, right? Daring? No. Clearly not. Rebecca is pulling one of those classic twenty-first-century faces: seemingly serious and actually serious. But, deep down, as bullshittingly false as all the other smiles, frowns and lovey-dovey dogshit expressions that we pull so sincerely. No, she won't forgive, in spite of Johnny's efforts.

‘It's not funny, Johnny.'

‘Maybe you just don't get it.'

‘I get it, Johnny, it's offensive.'

‘You just don't get me.'

These days, the idea of ‘getting' things and people is important. It relates almost directly to the idea of understanding. Johnny feels that Rebecca doesn't ‘get' him, that she doesn't understand him. Do you get me?

‘Oh for God's sake, Johnny, don't cry.'

‘I'm not fucking crying, Rebecca.'

He is, actually. As the confrontation began, tears started to congregate in the corners of his eyes. Now they're collapsing under their own weight; the first tear has just rolled down his cheek.

‘Johnny, I don't want you using those words. I won't tolerate that kind of vulgarity from you.'

Oh, dearest Johnny. He listens to Rebecca, wearing a face of weary surprise. He really has nothing. Nothing except Rebecca, whose friendship gives him hope, happiness and access to a cooler, more interesting stratum of student society.

‘Vulgar, you think I'm vulgar?' demands Johnny, his red cheeks wet and beaming.

Rebecca shrugs, her face the colour of treated pine. Natural but impenetrable. ‘I can't love you, Johnny. You know that, don't you?'

Five seconds pass. Johnny imagines that he doesn't contain bones, but simply a sparkling selection of interlocking blades. He stares at Rebecca as she walks away. She doesn't love him. He knows. He stops and stares at the ground, watching the stretch of grass that grows between them as Rebecca walks away.

‘Yes,' he says, ‘I know.'

Rebecca's footsteps do not fail, she strides away. Johnny continues to admire the ground. His eyes twitch and more tears tumble over their ridges on to his uneven, unfair face. The park becomes a blur, as if his eyes decide to function less, like they can't be arsed to work properly, weary as they are of beholding rubbish, melancholy occasions.

If you remember correctly, though, Johnny referred to the female genitals as a ‘twat'. This is almost certainly vulgar, particularly in the presence of a girl of Rebecca's intellect. The word ‘twat', you see, is more commonly known as a generic swear word, a moderately severe insult. So it's certainly a little risky to use the word in the old sense – as a signifier of the vagina. ‘Cunt' is a slightly different
story. It holds on more successfully to its sexual connotations, despite also being simply an insult.

Many of the swear words and insults of the 1990s and early twenty-first century originate as vernacular signifiers of the female sex organ. Cunt, twat, pussy, to name exactly three. It is, predictably, also true of words used to describe the male sex organs. Cock, prick, knob and dick are all legitimate insults, if a little less severe than those relating to the twat – or rather vagina. Fuck it. Words are fallen leaves.

Rebecca reaches Oxford Road and hails a bus. As she takes her seat her phone rings. It's the university, calling to discuss a problem with one of next year's modules.

‘I was going to do the Dostoevsky module,' she says. Through the grey of the bus window she notices Johnny exiting the park, his spine curved into a tragic arch, hands inside his endless pockets.

‘No, no. I'm in town. I'll come in and sort it out now.'

Johnny's eyes have certainly gone to shit. He can barely see a thing as he leaves the park. His mind tumbledries in a cycle of alternating bullshits. She can't love me, he thinks. I told her that I knew. I don't know anything. No one should ever ‘know' anything, Johnny confirms. ‘Knowing' things is exactly what makes life so tedious and boring. If we're going to start knowing things then we might as well be dead.

But yes, tumbledrying bullshit. Cycles cycle. Laugh or cry. Laugh or cry. So hard to choose. Johnny's always assumed the former to be of more use and fun, but now he just can't be sure. By the time the dog of history cocks its leg and sprays out the twenty-first century, everybody is laughing their arses off. Comedy's all over the TV, almost
everything is pissless. Despite wars and the odd moment of schedule-halting aggression, everybody is very much amused by life. It's hard to say whether that's good or bad. Laughter is, of course, normally part of being happy. But there is something sinister about twenty-first-century teeheeing. Everybody's wetting themselves. What's so funny?

Johnny strides towards central Fallowfield. As the shops begin to scroll, the promoters begin to leaflet. Boys with triangular torsos and girls with the best boobs thrust pieces of card at the pedestrians. Only, not for Johnny. He watches as each outstretched hand is hastily retracted as he walks by, watches as the flyers are returned neatly to the pile until a more suitable person walks by. Johnny can only glimpse the flyers, briefly hold the airbrushed eyes that advertise nights of sexy music, sexy dancing, sexy puking and fucking.

‘Here you are, mate, you'll enjoy this.'

At the corner of Braemar Road Johnny does receive a flyer, from a boy in a pink vest with eyes like upturned beetles. He looks down at it, ‘Shag Tag at Robinskis: Everyone Will Pull'. Johnny rests the flyer on top of an overflowing bin. Everyone will pull. I wouldn't, thinks Johnny, I couldn't pull string. But pulling, yes, it's vital for a good youth. Did you pull? your fellow young will ask. Who did you pull and were they absolutely as fit as fuck? Were they a lump of congealed sexiness with naked legs falling fit-as-fuckly from their arse? Did they have the muscles of a mutant and the smile of a magazine? Did they have shagging medals around their neck and was it happy screwing and was their bedroom brilliant in the morning? Did you pull? Did they fuck you stupid?

Johnny passes Bar Revolution where the wealthy students learn to look down on those destined for little. Boys swing
car keys around their fingers, flip-flops on their feet and ace haircuts all over their scalps. Girls talk shit and so do boys. The fit get whistled at and giggle, giggle because they hear the tones of fate in the whistling, hear the great youth that their perfect bodies will bring. Johnny shuffles by.

‘Not for me,' he says to himself, not knowing quite what he's referring to. ‘Not for me.'

He turns into a supermarket, reminding himself of his talents, listing them out loud.

‘Shitting, getting ill, breathing, eating.'

He gets funny looks. But something is changing. Getting broken down.

The entrance to the supermarket is dominated not by food but by magazines. Johnny feels like shit. He's covered in sweat and everything's a blur since his eyes ceased to see the point in seeing. Where is it? thinks Johnny. Where is my happy life?

Through the blur, a pair of tits leap from the magazine rack and staple both his eyes to the back of his skull. Jesus, thinks Johnny, his bowels loosening as if he might have to instantly shit. Such incredible breasts. They must belong to Lucy Something or other, she's got her hands all over them. Her fingers are surreptitiously placed over each nipple in accordance with certain laws passed in parliament. Chances are, if you were to buy the magazine, she'd put her arms down by her sides or in her mouth or on her hips. Either way you'd be able to see her nipples.

‘I could buy you,' says Johnny to the magazine. ‘Couldn't I? I could buy you and then that would be me, happy.'

Lads' magazines have been popular from the 1990s onwards. Johnny has never bought one but is familiar with
the content: articles on reasonably inexpensive cars, special reports about African tribes who plant trees in their arses, stuff on watches with global positioning technology, photographs and interviews with beautiful girls.

Right now Johnny can think of nothing else but returning home, throwing a large towel into a steaming hot shower, erecting his penis and slowly making love to the hot, wet fabric. He can't though. He's only got one towel and he hasn't got the guts.

He imagines what it would be like to get hold of the tits. Imagine if he found them in the street, without Lucy. Imagine if he just found them lying on their own, no blood, of course. He could take them home, be with them, touch them and have a really good time with each boob.

‘I could buy you,' he says again to the magazine, ‘that's exactly how it works!'

Johnny becomes aware of a figure behind him.

‘Are you gonna buy that, mate? It's the last copy.'

Johnny turns to see nothing but perfectly hairy muscles. A topless young man with his T-shirt folded and hanging out of his baggy white football shorts. It's not for me, thinks Johnny, none of this was intended for me.

‘No,' he says, putting the magazine into the young man's hand, ‘you take it.'

‘Cheers.'

Johnny watches as Lucy enters the young guy's grip, his thumb creasing her slightly, offering a strange perspective on her breasts. As if they're disconnected from her, and simply stand in front like a couple of painfully inflated skins.

Quite alone, Johnny walks the aisles of the supermarket. They shine, the products, each one shines with contentment.
People choose them. Student boys with calf-length shorts and three-day stubble. Girls with oversized canvas handbags and sunglasses branded in gold. Socks match trainers and lips match nails. Oh, they shine, the humans, each one shines with contentment. But not Johnny. He spots his reflection in the glass of a refrigerator and for a second hopes that he too is up for sale, priced like the ice creams and the Chicago pizzas, a look of lonely misery frozen on to his face.

No, thinks Johnny, turning from the fridge, I am not a product. Products are perfect. They have beautifully designed labels that wrap around perfect tin. Their innards are sealed in and preserved. Wonderful people design products, people with disposable income, takeaway coffee in their hands. They sit round tables and have lengthy discussions about target markets, cross-cutting commercial cleavages, lifestyle, image, the hard sell. I was designed by a dick, thinks Johnny, a lazy dick with no knowledge of the market. There was no table, no takeaway coffees, no talk of commercial possibility or love. I'm rotting inside. Unpreserved. I was aimed at no one, designed with no one in mind, shaped to fit the hands of nothing.

Johnny stands among the cereals, shoulders hunched with envy. Which aisle contains the tinned hearts? Under which heading has love been preserved?

THE SMELL OF
rotting rubbish has made its way down the lane, through a closed window and into Colin's nostrils. They flare in disgust. His bedroom is filthy; the sheets that surround him haven't been washed in over a year. He knows he has one more minute in bed before he has to get up, before an alarm will sound and he will have to shower and go to work.

If you were in the room, you'd find it difficult to determine the origin of the smell of rotting food and dog shit. Outside, you'd say, surely outside. But then your eyes would be drawn to the infested chest of drawers, choking on its wet, brown contents. On the floor, there are many piles of dirty plates, clothes and magazines. This is a room that a girl will never be brought back to. This is a room that only Colin will see. He is secretly, and ever so gently, breaking apart.

The infestation starts somewhere in the recesses of his brain; if you were to try, that's where you'd diagnose the first signs of rot and fury. How do you begin to pick apart
a brain? I guess you'd try to find some idea or principle, some memory or piece of faith that suddenly went bad, turned, changed, was hollowed out by some unknown and careful bacteria. Too late now. His whole brain's gone rotten, both milky hemispheres. Disdain and unhealth mess up his insides, stake him out, fuck about with his eyes. A light goes out. His body is weary, struggling. Colin is a boy burnt out by strange failures in his brain.

The infestation spreads. It smokes out of his pores and into his room. Everything in here looks as if it could never be moved, as if the contents have grown naturally into these discarded and obscene shapes, have grown brittle and will never regain flexibility, or be used again. The walls rejected Colin's posters long ago; they wilted and have since been destroyed, ripped underfoot, forgotten. He is running out of plates and cutlery; empty pizza boxes have been screwed up tight and thrown into one corner. His sheets are damp with dirt. The entire area by the window is wet to the touch.

Summer heats the room, causes it to boil. The stench of waste cannot be avoided and the infestation will only get worse. Colin is still able to wash, sanitise himself, spare the outside world for the time being, at least. But something has to give. Colin is aware that the pile of pizza boxes and at least two piles of clothes have developed communities. He's seen the spiders, he's seen the millipedes and the rat. He has allowed them to live. The insects are fickle – quick to feed on the fallen. They are reactionaries. Early converts to the culture of loathing. Colin hears the calling. He is the propagandist, the king of the parasites, equipped with an instinct for hurt, an unavoidable reflex to destroy.

Colin rolls over in bed, his face restless, cheeks flinching because of the sweat. Since being chucked out of The Bar
his mind has been on women. He'd spewed to think of them. He's been thinking about his last girlfriend, Marion, who left only last year.