Ménage (25 page)

— What fucking elephant? he shouted — we’re not in fucking Africa!

I sat back and watched a scene of the most absurd beauty, as the moon shone casting long shadows over a blind man who tiptoed with excruciating caution around a tiny enclosure of plastic play animals.

— Take a left, no, no, your right, my left, right? Dot was shouting.

— I can’t stand it any longer! Save me from myself! Saul proclaimed as he froze on the spot, eyes closed but to the heavens. We rushed over to him.

— You were brilliant, Dot said, as she took him in her arms and covered his closed eyes in kisses.

— Failure is my fate, my dears, he said, as he rested on a play animal. — Even a pink plastic hippo finds me an object of mirth.

Amid much laughter we drank the remains of the sherry and my last memory of the night was of Saul and Dot on either side of the seesaw, as I stood on the central pivot, rocking them back and forth with my feet, keeping an eye out from my perch for the police as they laughed like
naughty
children. And I thought that, in a strange way, we had returned to that state of joy we’d first known, before they had paired off, when we shared her affections equally. I have no memory of how we staggered home to bed and it was only morning when I realised which bed. I woke to find an arm round me and it was not Dot’s but Saul’s. I turned and there she was, one hand between her legs, her naked breasts falling onto the pillow. Her other hand was covering my crotch, which to my alarm I discovered to be naked. While Saul slept on beside me, I unpeeled myself from their bodies and wondered what subconscious desires might have that night have been acted out under the alibi of amnesiac drunkenness.

Most days she was off to Goldsmiths or the warehouse, to talk to Pierce and all the other new artists about who got what space and the electricity problem and what was to be done about flyers. She was all lists and extension cables and power points and video instruction manuals. Her appearance, every day was increasingly devastating to behold. She had shoplifted a fur coat and cut the arms off to make into some kind of armbands or muffler. She tore the collar off and wore it as a necklace of sorts. I sensed that all this manic energy was fuelled by a fear of what Dot was actually getting herself into. It was three weeks till the
Bug
show, a month to her degree show and I still had not seen how she’d turn her tapes into art. I insisted on accompanying her to the warehouse one day to unravel the mystery. I offered to carry her TV there for her and her extension cables.

Bug
was in an old biscuit warehouse off Camden Lock above a kebab shop and bookies. The windows on the first floor had been covered in corrugated metal, probably by the council, and the front door had been booted in. As soon as we were climbing up the dusty steps the smell of fungus and what seemed like dead meat was overwhelming, mixed
with
something sweet, like sugar or vomit. The other thing that overwhelmed the senses were the sounds, many, of radios, footsteps, hammers banging, people shouting. It was hard going carrying the TV and Dot helped me. All along the stairwell walls there were flyers for other exhibitions,
Die Yuppie Scum
and something called
Sale
.

We reached the top stairs and the place expanded exponentially before me. Dozens of young artists marching past with hammers, boards; no one paid us the slightest attention.

A woman with dreadlocks and Doc Martens walked past carrying a mannequin with a dildo for a nose.

— Hi, is Pierce here? Dot asked.

The woman shook her head and looked me up and down. I was obviously not cool enough. Dot showed me the way to her space. The whole place had been partitioned off into large cubicle-type areas. Again, no one seemed to pay her any heed. I’d expected a Pierce or a Hirst to come up to her and greet her excitedly.

We passed some photos of foetuses in formaldehyde, derivative of Hirst but lacking the humour. An older woman had made a sculptural bust of her bust out of something that looked like dog food. There were tins of the stuff next to it on the floor by the plinth and a sign that said ‘Sponsored by Kennomeat’. I passed some graffiti sprayed on the wall that read: A PILLAR OF LOTTERY TICKETS THREE THOUSAND FEET HIGH. And another that read: 365 EMPTY PICTURE FRAMES PLACED RANDOMLY ROUND THE UK.

We followed the hammering and passed a young man who was making pictures entirely out of the red dots that galleries stick on artworks to show they have been sold.

I struggled on as Dot again asked another artist, a terrifying-looking bare-chested bloke with tattoos, where Pierce was. Fuck Pierce, the guy said then sprinted off. There was a weary workaholic sense of commerce, career and competition
about
them all. The artists seemed to resent contact with each other. Many had draped material over the openings of their enclosure and all they seemed to do was bitch about the others. And this was a ‘movement’. How could this disparate bunch of aggressive individualists ever amount to a collective anything? A far cry indeed from the surrealists and the Dadaists and all the other ists that Saul worshipped. I considered trying again to get an article published in the
Guardian
. I had recently got the editor’s address.

We turned the corner of a stack of MDF boards and a funky young blond skinheaded guy turned to Dot and smiled. Finally I set down the TV. It was hard to hear what they were saying as someone was experimenting with a stereo, the banging and sawing was so extreme and people were shouting everywhere, but among lots of name-dropping about Tracey and Damien I got the gist. The guy led Dot to her space and so I had to pick up the TV again.

The guy turned to me. — You’re a writer then, yeah?

I shrugged.

— You want to see my work? His studio space was right next to Dot’s. Dot encouraged me to give the guy a minute.

I smelled it before I saw it. His work appeared to be shit on lollypop sticks.

— Yer s’pose to suck ’em, he said. — Or stick ’em back up yer arse like a cock.

— Really? I said.

— Capitalism’s shit, he said, — that’s what it’s about.

It is never a good idea, as Saul once said, to take a metaphor literally. He handed me his CV and some photos and I smiled to myself as I thought he could rename the work ‘poopsickles’. He shook my hand vigorously and again asked me what paper I worked for. I made my excuses and headed back towards Dot, reflecting on how depravity seemed to be ‘in’. Extraordinary how many of the poor buggers had abandoned conventional artist’s materials to
work
in shit, piss and blood. I saw tabloids printing pictures of some very average, scared art students trying and failing to be spectacularly offensive, checking the exact consistency of their poo, as if they were da Vinci testing colours of oil paint. It was all perhaps some terribly sincere attempt to prove that their art came from deep within their unique selves, which, since more than five of them were doing pretty much the same thing, seemed not so unique.

I much preferred Dot’s videos. They moved in a subtle way, with qualities utterly absent in her peers. With their intimacy.

I pulled the drape back and there she was. There was an old video player and mess of wires on the floor. She had just joined up my extension cable to another that seemed joined to yet another and was about to plug the TV into it.

— Well, here goes, she said.

Thankfully the TV came to life, but with no image, just fuzz. She stared at it.

— I don’t really fit in, do I? she said. — They’re all so much smarter than me.

— Not at all, I said, — your stuff’s going to be great. I plugged in her video player and got one of her tapes from her rucksack and stuck it in, turned it on. The cross-dressing one. — See, I said, great.

But I did worry for her. There was no way she could compete with these wannabe scandalmongers. I tried to encourage her. We sat and stared at the cross-dressing. It wasn’t working for her, minutes passed and she was silent, sitting there on the dusty floor, fiddling with the cables. I put on the moustache tape.

— You think I should show just one tape? On different tellys? Or lots?

I shrugged. — Sorry, maybe . . . Uhm . . .

— Or get a big screen and a video projector, they’re expensive. Or make a kind of stack of TVs?

I apologised again for my ignorance and her eyes became fixed on the white walls. Behind it and beyond, the sounds of a hundred hammers, drills, feet, purposeful activity. I looked round at the plug sockets, the old TVs. Her breathing quickened, she started hyperventilating.

— Saul would know what to do, she said.

An overwhelming sense of failure came over us both.

— Oh God, oh God, I’m so fucking useless.

I held her, she kissed my neck, bit my ear, whispered in a hiss, — Fuck me!

We were animal, clawing at each other. I fell to my knees and tore her shirt from her. She wrapped her leg around my head as I feasted on her moistening cunt muttering insanities. – My darling, my Duchess! I could feel her looking round, gripping my head, whispering.

— Quick, what if someone sees, we must be quick. I can hear someone coming. There was no one, it was just her little game. I put first one then another finger deep inside her and her pelvis bucked, her spine arched, my teeth tore into her thigh, as my little finger circled her anus. I felt her cunt spasm around my fingers and suddenly a hot gush sprayed my face. Her body writhing, she started screaming.

— Come in my face, come in me!

I covered her mouth with my hand and she struggled as if violated, as we fell to the ground. Around us the banging did not cease and the ground shook with drills. Her legs spasmed and she kicked the wall. I tore her pants off and was soon inside her, thrusting only for seconds before spraying all over her cunt lips, her skirt and face.

We heard footsteps behind us, from the other side of the partition. I made her lie still. Shh. We both looked and saw clearly that Dot’s foot and panties were visible from the opening.

Don’t move, I whispered.

The footsteps receded and we broke apart.

— Fuck, maybe it was Pierce, she said.

Again it struck me, how the idea of being watched secretly had aroused her.

— Don’t worry, I said, — if anyone saw they’d probably just think it was performance art.

She laughed and held me. I apologised for coming too soon but she didn’t care, she said, we still had time to work on it.

But what if her art was like my cock, failed and premature. In my mind some absurd equivalence was forming. If I could hold back my ejaculations then her success as an artist would be assured. My fear was that we were just fucking around and wasting time and would be left with nothing.

That night when we got back Saul was already comatose in his bed, with three boxes of sherry denuded. Dot wanted to wake him to ask his advice but I calmed her.

— Shh, he hates being woken. Here, help me take his boots off.

I noticed that a job application lay on the floor, spilled sherry blurring the words he had written. Dot got her video camera; she wanted to film Saul’s sleeping face. She plugged it into the back of the telly and his face filled the screen. We sat there silent then on the edge of his bed as he snored, staring not at him, but at his TV face. We managed to get a glass out of the last sherry box and I smoked. Dot lay down next to Saul and I curled up with my head resting on her lap.

— What are we to do? I heard her whisper.

I must have dozed off as I was woken by movement. She was stroking me, kissing me, whispering shh. It took me a while to work out where I was. The ceiling, the posters, the sense of him just beside me, the stench of his alcohol sweat. Then his face still there on the TV screen. Dot’s face over me, grinning like a demon.

— Shh, she whispered, her hand covering my mouth as the other reached for my cock. I could not, I would not.

— Shh, stop struggling or he’ll hear us.

That was when it happened. At first there were just gentle kisses as we watched the screen, but then things quickly got out of control. Her hand was at my belt again, and her mouth round my stiffening cock.

— My God, no, no, you’ll wake him up!

Her mouth full, she could not speak, she motioned to the TV. She was staring at it too, at Saul’s face on TV, as if we were to watch it, not him, for emergency signs of his waking. That he was on TV seemed to give us licence to ignore the fact that he was sleeping inches from us on the bed. Playfully the demon pinned down my arms with her knees and thrust her naked sex in my face.

Her mouth already fast at my cock, the smell of her sex, her pubes teasing my lips. I saw Saul’s face twitch on the TV and froze.

I prayed for it to be over soon. I could hear him moving in the bed just inches from us. She took me deep into her mouth and was making herself gag on my cock, her teeth riding rugged over my swollen head. From beyond the line of buttocks, where the panties bit tight into her thigh I caught the glimpse of light in her eye from the TV. She was watching the TV. She shuddered suddenly wetting my face with her cum. Her pelvis bucking in spasms and I was thrown into a frenzy sucking the juice from her soaking, twitching cunt.

She got up then, whispered shh, and went back to her bedroom, smiling to herself and I was left to face the sleeping Saul, my face reeking of her. He mumbled something and I froze.

He mumbled again.

— Turn . . . off . . . the light – that was all. I lay there staring at the TV screen. My face and Saul’s were together on its surface.

I feared the morning when Saul would work out what had happened.

I must have dozed off because I awoke beside him. He was not abrupt, as I expected. He simply spent the usual reverent time to find a butt end big enough to relight and stared out at his scattered records and clothes as he smoked.

— It’s fucking obscene, he said. — Unbelievable.

He stared perplexed at the TV screen with the image of his own feet on it, then, disgruntled, unplugged the camera and stuck on the news.

— Look, I’m really really sorry . . .