Ménage (12 page)

‘It was just, well, someone told me about a guy who got thrown out at my opening night, a tramp, they said . . . you don’t think . . .?’

‘No, I’m sure he’s fine . . . you know him and his cult of the Übermensch, he’s probably living in a cave by now.’

‘Screaming at the hypocrisies of civilisation.’

‘With a hundred disciples.’

‘Poor Saul.’

‘Yes.’

It had maybe been the wine, or the nostalgia, or the way that one sentence fed the next, or some need to stop talk of the past and end the many questions with the touching of lips.

Molly was having a sleepover with friends, so he could stay, she said, as she pulled away from his kiss and pulled her T-shirt over her head.

‘By the way, you don’t have to meet her, she’s a nightmare, I love her to bits.’

She led him by the hand to the bedroom and finished undressing before him. Her breasts had shrunk and there were stretch lines round her darkened areolae and across her stomach, but she seemed to him more perfect than before. She slid under the covers and he turned his back to her as he undressed, then reached back and pulled the sheets to hide his sex. There was awkwardness as their bodies touched. He tried to kiss her lips but his forehead bashed her cheek and there were apologies. He ran his hand over her pelvis but she said it was too ticklish. She touched his cock and he was nervous about how the nervousness had made it flaccid.

‘You can open your eyes,’ she said. ‘I’m not going to bite.’

They were eye to eye, her fingers round his cock and his circling her clit. He lowered his gaze first. ‘Sorry,’ meaning sorry for what he couldn’t say, sorry for everything.

‘Shh,’ she whispered. ‘I know, me too.’

And so they agreed not to fuck but to sleep, back to back. But over the dark hours in half-waking their breathing rhythms came into sync and their mouths were urgent to dissolve into each other. In his many years since her, it had not been like this with a woman, opening himself as if he was the one penetrated. In between the endless cycles of it, in momentary rest and craving for sleep, he tried to explain it away; told himself it was mercy fucking, just nostalgia, sad really, two people old enough to know better, fucking with their past, mad to open themselves to such naked need. But in the seeping dawn light, her eyes in shadow were over him again, whispering his name as she encircled and pulled him deep inside.

*

The sounds were of objects being thrown, furniture falling over, screams, laughter, what seemed to be dancing, and fluids being spilled – like a murder or a science experiment. It had ceased to be anything that could be recognised as the sounds of coitus and often had me tiptoeing the corridor to Saul’s keyhole to see if they were OK. Every night this horror would wake then reawaken me just when I though it was over. For three long weeks I had endured it. I had made plans to leave before Christmas.

To add insult to injury, in the many mornings after, they would pretend that nothing was happening between them. Did they think me deaf or a dummy or did their deception arouse them further? I was not spying, but I could not fail to glimpse their many stolen intimacies: their fingers touching in secrecy beneath the table; the little smiles in the kitchen. The way they fell silent suddenly when I entered his room and sprung apart into grinning silence. Even more galling was the way they made a special effort to keep me
included
in everything. And so we watched a movie ‘together’ – another Bergman – but I did not see a single frame, as I was too busy trying to avoid the sight of their fingers finding each other beneath the duvet.

They went to Edna’s again and I was not invited. In spite, I went into her empty room and stole a pair of her panties. Back in my room, I sniffed the stained crotch and came violently into the floral fabric. Overcome with shame I told myself I was not becoming sick, it was they that were sick, sick and weak – the Übermensch and his Überwench. As if to prove how weak they had become, she had even invented a love name for him: Sozzle. — C’mon, Sozzle, let’s have a drink. — Where are you, Sozzle? — Oh, Soz, you look fabulous. How low the mighty Saul had stooped. The sound of that name made me puke.

I tried to plan an escape but needed money, much more than the scrawny fifteen quid I was getting from the
Hoxton Advertiser
for my weekly book or album reviews. As soon as I had enough money, and paid Dot back the two hundred I owed her, I’d get the hell out and leave them to their squalid secrecies – that was what I thought. Finding work was tough though, there had been more strikes at the main newspapers, and it was Wapping all over again. If I could have filled in an application to be a scab I would have. But I was caught in another catch-22 – I’d have to invest in some new respectable clothes just to get a job, and the contract, being freelance, would probably only last a few weeks, after which time I’d have earned enough to pay back the debt on my new clothes.

It was the recession, I told myself, not my fault, and kept searching: telesales, trainee recruitment consultant, more telesales. Call centres, more call centres. I found a flyer from a car windscreen: ‘EARN £50 TO £500 EXTRA PER WEEK WORKING FROM HOME.’ It looked hopeful so I called the guy. He kept on about what a unique opportunity it was and asking for my name and details. I could hear
him
typing, filling in a form. I worked out he was getting paid for getting my details – that was his job. It was even more surreal when I finally found out what the job was he was selling – it was putting round flyers and taking calls like mine. I had to have him clarify – wait, so, the job is getting other people to put round flyers for a job that is getting other people to put flyers round, for a job that doesn’t actually exist? He hung up.

‘BUDDING ENTREPRENEUR? – CONSIDER RECRUITMENT.’

I was stuck, without the finances to move out, and trapped also in a horrible déjà vu. Exactly the same thing had happened to me years before. When, after four months living with Debs, our love turned sour and we were trapped in daily animosity because neither of us could afford to move out. Almost a year of livid hatred. Some sociologist one day had to document this living hell called London.

After another night being awoken by Saul and Dot’s orgasmic giggling, I prayed to the dead God to visit a plague upon them both.

I felt almost guilty for how swiftly my wish became real. Within only a month of their initial union their passion started failing. One morning, from along the corridor, I heard her trying to get him to rise.

— C’mon, Sozzle, get up. Let’s go shoplifting. You can’t just lie there all day and do nothing.

— Oh but I can. Procrastination is an art I practise without hesitation! he groaned in reply, for his nth time.

Her high energy or the force they’d expended sexually had exhausted Saul and led him to a state of regression, sleeping late, becoming sullen and foul-mooded in the morning wakings that soon turned into afternoons. She made the same mistakes I had long before, attempting more inventive and exciting enticements.

— Let’s go to Harvey Nicks and spend five hundred. I’ll put it on my mum’s account.

— I have no enthusiasm for people who are enthusiastic, he replied. — It is all cheerleaders and bombs in Palestine.

— Get up!

— This lady’s not for turning! he shouted, quoting Thatcher.

Even though I resented their coupling, I couldn’t help but pity her. The closer she got to him, the more she tried to motivate him, the more he froze her out. This was maybe why he vowed never to have a woman again. A certain emotional (and financial) dependence had been exposed in him and he resented it. The big chill had started. I knew because he had gone back to playing his Wagner.

— Penises are everywhere! Dot declared as she sprang through the front door, as was her way in the days that followed. She’d just been to the City Racing opening; it was an old betting shop, near the Oval, turned into an indie gallery. All very trendy, she said, artists exhibiting
objets trouvés
– a basketball and an electric bar fire and 365 used lottery tickets. She met this guy called Pierce and he was doing another show next month and he liked the sound of her video art. She was so excited. I had not the heart to remind her that she hadn’t actually made anything resembling art yet.

She was running around the flat, trying to wake Saul. The Revolting Cocks were gigging that week, she announced, and she’d bought us both tickets as a surprise. She’d pay for taxis and everything. Of course, Saul wanted nothing to do with it. I’d been in the kitchen and overheard the whole thing. (I spent rather a lot of time in the kitchen in those weeks. It was between his room and mine. How many hours had I spent staring at the mould on the Artex and the warped Formica and the aluminium pans with burned bases while
trying
to work out if I should intervene to save them from each other?)

— But you
love
the Revoling Cocks! she protested.

— I never said I loved anything; besides, like certain women I know, they are both repetitive and predictable. She kept on, thinking her enthusiasm would win. I went to the doorway edge and peered inside.

She was throwing clothes out of his wardrobe, trying to get him to sit up and get dressed, shouting then about Sarah Lucas, she’d met her, she had a kind of art shop with Tracey Emin in Bethnal Green and they were lovely and they wanted her to come and hang out. They were putting on a ‘happening’ in the next week – everyone had to wear fake beards and do life drawings of a naked man. Wasn’t that great? They should go. And there had been this photo Sarah had exhibited, like a bowl of soup but there were things floating in the soup – penis heads, photos of dick heads. And then it was Jake and Dinos Chapman, and their child mannequins with vaginas for mouths and dicks for noses and she’d been reading a story in the paper on the tube about the Operation Spanner trial. It was all very exhilarating. A group of sadomasochists had been arrested for committing violent acts against themselves.

— Penises, you see, they’re everywhere! We could make cock art, she said as she tried to pull his foot from beneath the sheets and put on his socks.

— Sex destroys art, Saul said. — There is only so much energy one can ejaculate from oneself. It’s the same with love, us real artists have no energy left for it. Please unhand my foot!

— But can’t you see, she shouted, — we’re so happening? Can I film your cock, Sozzle?

He stared at her impassively, and pulled his bared foot back inside the covers.

— My dear, you are so open-minded that all of your
thoughts
simply fall out of your fucking skull. I suggest you analyse the etymology of the word dickhead.

She gave up and marched out. I hid myself in the kitchen as she passed.

Two hours later and her drunken voice screamed from beyond my door.

— Fuck you. I’m getting out of here, going clubbing!

— Fine, fuck off then.

I could hear them out in the corridor. It was well past 2 a.m.

— Just me and Owen, you’re not invited.

She had not even asked me to a club. It tormented me that she could use me as a pawn in such a way, as if she could ever make him jealous.

— Good idea, why don’t you fuck him too? Saul shouted back. — Then fuck off.

— Fine then, I shall, but we shan’t be coming back. She was at my door then, and I pretended I hadn’t been listening.

Just then Saul slammed his door and yelled, — Fuck you, I’m going clubbing – not you! And marched out.

Dot followed him and the argument ensued in the street outside the kebab shop. We never made it to a club or pub; they were both so drunk already and the fresh air must have hit them hard. I carried both their drunken weights back along Old Street. Terrible silences between them and I was the one in the middle, supporting their staggering rages. She tried to punch him and he tried to scratch her.

— Tell your bulimic bitch friend to fuck off and leave us alone, Saul said to me.

— Oh, so he’s not speaking to me, she said. — Well, tell your faggot friend that I think he’s a loser and drunk.

— Tell her she looks like a pig in shit.

— STOP, BEHAVE! Was I their translator now, their mediator? — Fucking spoiled brats, the pair of you.

They hated me for it, but still leaned on me, for stability. Like some comedy show of two cowards trying to hit each other, knowing that there was someone in the middle to restrain them both. The proof was, when I did nothing they desisted from their violence and both stared at me, as if I was a grown-up denying them sweets. All of this in full public display as we passed the jeering, whistling drunks by the George & Vulture.

If they had made a soap-opera version of Nietzsche’s eternal return for TV it would have been our flat; we were trapped in an endless rerun of the same day. She’d gone back to playing her old records, just to piss him off. On one typical morning Saul stormed past me to the bathroom, his eyes burning red through dark foundation, his kimono flapping behind him.

— I have but one goal today, to destroy the cultural hegemony of Joni Mitchell! he proclaimed, then vomited violently into the bath.

— You make me sick, she shouted from her room.

— Puke then, he called back, — it’s what you do best! But use the kitchen as the bathroom is occupied, and clean the plates when you’re done! And buy some Vim and cheese, would you? I’m a bit peckish.

It would not have gone on like that if they did not enjoy it. I feared I had become some kind of marriage-guidance counsellor or, worse, a pawn in some game designed to heighten their passions.

My position was puerile; as voyeur of their traumas I swear I felt more for both of them than they felt for each other. I sat by my door trying to make out their distant words and silences; I spied on them through the gap. It was like some avant-garde movie, sound and picture out of sync. I spent hours trying to work out the plot as they drifted in and out of shot and I caught snatches of dialogue.

Things were thrown, smashed, doors slammed, feet walking out only to return with screaming. Always her doing the throwing, the walking out, the returning, the screaming again. Always she who accused him of the same damn things. As soon as her foot was out the door he turned his music on full blast. Always the Wagner. There was a pattern to her returns too. Always with a 750ml of Smirnoff and he had never been able to afford Smirnoff and so let her back in.