Twentysix (4 page)

L
l

I
must have a body because some obscure object lives within me.

Ruby, who in a former life was Rudy, running around with his Chelsea hooligan mates kicking nine bells out of anyone and everyone, is telling us about her latest trade. Ruby has yet to have the chop the op and finds plenty of men who want to suck on a cock in a frock. She is regaling us as we stand by the moonblue trees, having a break from the relentless hunt for satiety, performing for us the monologue with which she accompanied her last conquest. She is dressed to depress, in a black strappy number that shows off the scars where the British Bulldog and Union Jack tattoos have been removed; she stands there, cross-eyed with drink in a cross-eyed wig, yelling: ‘Oh, yeah, go on, baby, suck on my gonorrhoea, suck on my AIDS, suck on my herpes, yeah, suck it, suck my syphilis, go on, suck my AIDS, go on, suck it, suck my gonorrhoea, suck my herpes, suck my fucking AIDS.’ She waits for the laughter to die down before adding, ‘And you know what, the bastard wouldn’t even swallow.’

Now and again Rudy makes an appearance, and Ruby’s feminine demeanour disappears in a vapour of violence. She builds such walls around herself that no one could ever scale them. But I have also seen that moment when who she wants to be and who she appears to be coincide so gloriously that it is enough to make you trust in saints.

It is thus not a question of language or the body, but language
and
the body as an interface of matter itself.

M
m

A
wasteland.

Bald earth sprouting a comb-over of weeds.

Night-time.

A suburb somewhere in Southern Italy.

A man I have just met is fucking me over the bonnet of his car, which is parked in a pathway swathed between an overgrown field and a dense orchard, beyond which the only indication of civilisation is the howling of a pack of dogs. The stars and the sound of the cicadas knit a blanket around me, and the metal against my skin is still warm from the engine. His friend has his cock in my mouth and thrusts unenthusiastically, more taken by the sight of his mate’s cock slamming into me, a sight he illuminates with a torch that he holds and guides like a spotlight. They chatter away to each other in Italian (a language I don’t speak) and behave, for all the world, as though I weren’t there. The present no longer has any meaning. I am merely a sensation suspended between them, an excuse for a commonality each, perhaps, in his own silent way, craves – but could
never, except now, with my flesh shared like a meal between them, even begin to articulate. These visions of excess burn brightest.

N
n

A
dream about you.

Its appearance, furthermore, provokes both fear and fascination.

I was in a record shop when suddenly there appeared before me a naked man who so corresponded with my desire that it was as unsettling as a dream come true. He wanted me to wash him and as I did – people all around still rifling through records – I realised, with a joy that also broke my heart with its impossibility, its fragility and its immateriality, that it was you. I washed your body slowly, tenderly, my heart speeding away: so happy it hurt. When I had finished, I stood up, and our eyes met for the first time, followed by our mouths. To kiss you again made me weak and afraid, but so happy. So happy. Then you told me you had a lover, and he appeared beside you, also naked. He doesn’t speak English, you said. I told you that I too have a lover and I turned around to him. I put my arm across his shoulders. It is clear to both you and me, without a word being spoken, that we want each other as much as we ever did. Your eyes, my eyes, our eyes. Our bodies like two strange
angels, calling to each other in a frequency outside of human range. It must be the saddest sound. I’m glad that we can’t hear it. It would never stop breaking our hearts. The difference between what we want and what we are able to do emerges with the slow, poisonous crawl of grief. The hunger doesn’t abate, it seems; it only eats you up.

I wake to find your presence still alighting on my skin, a fragment of your warmth, the weight of you still pressing, and a blurred memory of the dream’s end. The skin thus functions as an epistemological limit, even in the most phantasmatic journeyings beyond it.

O
o

T
he house was in need of repair, and looked as if it hadn’t been lived in for a while. I think he only used it for such encounters. He offered us warm fizzy white wine to drink. The house smelled of dereliction and suspended existences. There were several dogs, of varying sizes and breeds, all yapping and barking as if they had something important to impart. In one room the floor was covered in dry dog food knocked from a zigzag of bowls. We went to the bedroom and me and my mate started to undress the guy and kiss him. My friend got the guy’s cock out practically straight away, and thank god it was a decent size. We both sucked it for a while and it grew bigger and bigger till we were both impressed and excited. After a while we were all naked and the guy wanted to fuck me. So he fucked me and I watched in the dressing table mirror.

Where do they come from, these voices that tell us what to do?

When we’d finished, and my friend had swallowed the guy’s spunk, we got dressed. My mate didn’t want the man to put his cock away. He held onto it and couldn’t
stop kissing it and saying, ‘Wow! It’s gorgeous.’ He was totally in love with it.

In this society I live in, everyone dreams of being able to speak like this. But it really isn’t possible to speak like this in our society. If sexuality has a voice it has yet to find it. 

P
p

H
e walks in the door and falls straight to the floor, belly pressed against the boards, and begins slurping from the dog bowl of piss you have placed there. He breaks off to look up at you and ask, ‘Does sir want me to drink it all?’

‘Yes.’

You marvel at his submission, at his desire to be degraded. It fascinates and disgusts you. Short-term memory includes forgetting as a process.

You pull down your football shorts and pull aside your jockstrap, releasing your semi-hard cock, and then you watch him kneel at your feet and hold the bowl up to his mouth so he can drain it – with a delicacy that belies the moment – in tiny bird sips.

‘Good boy,’ you say when he has finished and placed the bowl back down.

You push your cock into his mouth, right down to the root, making him gag and choke, which makes you harder. You withdraw and slap your prick against his face, and he groans. You turn around, and present your rump to his face. He buries his foraging tongue,
as if he could crawl inside and sleep on the moss there, die there.

The veneration I feel for that part of the body and the great tenderness that I have bestowed on the men who have allowed me to enter it, the grace and sweetness of their gift, oblige me to speak of all this with respect. It is not profaning the most beloved of the dead to speak, in the guise of a poem whose tone is still unknowable, of the happiness he offered me when my face was buried in a fleece that was damp with my sweat and saliva and that stuck together in little locks of hair which dried after love-making and remained stiff.

You turn around and hold out your cock, uttering the single word, ‘Toilet.’

He holds his mouth open for the steady jet of warm, clear liquid, which arcs from your body to his, from inside you to inside him, this circuit of pleasure and waste that constructs its own economy within this blasted region of the soul.

By the time he leaves, he has choked so much on your cock that bile stains are visible on his shirt and trousers, you can see the black curls of his chest hair through the damp fabric; he has drunk your piss and swallowed your cum, and thanked you for the privilege. He measures the success of these encounters by the amount of piss and seed consumed.

Something has been released, some demon fed; the walls fall away and spaces yawn around you, unfathomable, unknowable spaces. And although it is still daylight, all you can see is darkness, the many shades of darkness, patterning your vision of yourself and this
world, yourself in this world. And you see him, getting into his car, renegotiating his way back into his life, as you must renegotiate your way back into yours. It isn’t possible to write sufficiently in the name of an outside.

Q
q

T
he bed is covered in naked men, an eiderdown of flesh. Two Italians (one from the north, one from the south), a Brazilian, and two Brits (one from the north, one from the south).

Commenting on the action later to a friend, one of them will say, ‘I took two cocks up my arse at once; it felt fucking great,’ thereby proving the inadequacy of words, demonstrating how they wring dry the intensity of every moment and hang it up for inspection, hang it out to dry, colourless and mistaken. Wrap me in colours that cannot be described, patterns that change with each movement like a kaleidoscope. Give me a world beyond what is here. Give me a body in flames dancing in a place where there is no shame. Give me lies, if you like, but take me there, to that other world where language can only play games of hide and seek with what is really going on.

Either that or give me the words with which I can speak, teach me a new tongue that licks itself closer to the contours of bodies. Make my voice form shapes and sounds approximating more perfectly the perfect
anguish of my joy. How does anybody learn? How can language say that? It trips and flies like an angel avoiding the bullets being shot at its feet. A dance of desperation and avoidance. Give me words with substance, words that taste of skin and smell like a well-fucked man. Give me a new alphabet, a new vocabulary of sliding verbs and solid nouns. A is for all of it, B is for bareback, C is for craving. Twenty-six letters burning in the flames like a taste upon the tongue. D is for deeper, E is for everything, F is for fear. And fear is for those who cannot speak this way, but stutter none the less, tripping over tongues that hold a key, a key to another world, a key that is swallowed before it can be snatched and used to unlock the cage door, before it can let loose this new alphabet that would flit around your head like so many birds, embroidering a song with no meaning, a song that exists for its own sake, for its own beauty, a song that tells of nothing but the joy it manifests.

Give me this language, if you can.