Yes Yes More More Page 5

  “This is meta-food,” said Lucy, stroking a prawn. Carl swilled his glass about a bit and sniffed it. Lucy poured a bit of water into her absinthe and I held mine up so she’d do the same for me. Then I sipped my pearly drink and watched Lucy, the best of all my best friends, pull the head and tail off that prawn, drag a nail along its roe-covered belly and suck the little black eggs from her fingers.

  Then my boy Carl was talking to Stella, who hadn’t seen him for a while and was glad of a fresh audience for her tales of last weekend, when she had gone to Southend with Jackson for Jackson’s grandma’s 100th birthday at Jackson’s mum’s house. She’d waltzed with Jackson’s stepdad round their front room, in their two-up-two-down terrace, yellowed all over from fag smoke and with cranberry glass in the cabinets. She’d watched as Jackson’s niece, not quite two, had ambled straight into the garden pond – “I was holding two glasses of pink wine, I couldn’t do a thing” – and later she had sat in the front room holding his grandma’s downy hand.

  And then Jackson’s seven-year-old nephew had asked if he could draw Stella’s picture. Which was sweet. He had already drawn Jackson in a big notebook, made Jackson look like Desperate Dan, basically. He was not an unskilled little artist. And he’d drawn his mum, Jackson’s sister, who was all hair and toothy smile, also very sweet. He sat there looking at Stella, drew her hair (black), her legs (long) and her eyes (blue), then he added big boobies (“Is that what they’re called when you’re seven?”) and then, between her legs, he scribbled a huge black bush.

  “Cheeky shit!” Stella laughed. “It looked like Mr Messy, but without the smiley face.”

  Carl’s face was scrunched up in delight and he shuddered with giggles.

  “In the end the bush was bigger than me,” Stella sighed.

  Lucy was doing my easy-peasy DJing for me, putting on Alice Coltrane, “because no one ever in the history of civilisation has complained about hearing Alice Coltrane in a chi-chi north London pub on a hungover Sunday afternoon, you know, and no one ever will.” Then she was chatting to Paulie, and they headed to the bar for more absinthe and to talk to Al and Joe and Jamie, who had just walked in. Stella was in the toilets, or maybe she was with Lucy at the bar.

  So Carl snuggled up against me with the crossword. We were half-sitting, half-lying on the big leather sofa, sunlight faint through thick old glass, dirt between the floorboards, flowers blousy and wilting. We were quiet there together for a few still minutes. Once or twice Carl turned his head to touch his nose to my ear, or to my neck, or to rest his lips on my shoulder. There were people around and a messy night coming for us, but nothing yet to do except think Romantic poem or scene (5). Existing only in bits and pieces (11).

  Three hours later the pub was properly packed. Franco was playing You Can Call Me Al and we were dancing on the tables. Stella grabbed my leg and held it up for the bass solo, slapped and popped the imaginary strings running down my thigh while I hung onto her shoulder, hopped on my other leg. Carl was doing the brass. I was sticky with absinthe. Then next, when I heard Kids In America starting, I was so excited that I just fell over like an ecstatic tim-berrrrrrr tree. Except that I didn’t quite, because Lauren and Mandy and a few others were dancing right next to our table, and Mandy shouted “catch her!” and they lifted me and passed me along, right around the bar and rotating me, in a slow and cuddly crowdsurf. Long before I’d got to the first batch of “naaa naa na-na naaa” they’d delivered me softly back and upright to the table and I was baptised by good vibes. Seriously.

  A man’s head had appeared for a moment or two between my legs just as I was being gently spun back round towards my table. The eye contact we made had somehow been more happy than awkward. He was pretty. He had big dark eyes and a wonky nose. I went to the toilet a few songs after Kim, and as I came back out of the rickety door he was walking up the stairs. I backed into the bathroom, not thinking really about anything except his big wonky nose and his smiling face between my legs. What was especially nice is that he just smiled at me, laughed quietly like a tickled toddler, and walked straight in after me, stroked my cheek, kissed me. We circled round each other for a second and then I had my back against the door and he knelt in front of me, pulled my jeans open. The idea of him giving me head in the toilet was better than the head he actually gave me, but that was okay. He was giggly and slobbery and, Well, what gusto, what an appetite! I thought, He’s really relishing this. He tasted delicious when I kissed him (of course) and he was straightforward and affectionate. He nuzzled me a little longer and then he left me alone for the rest of the night. So pretty.

  The bar was still thronged, hot like it might be good for your bronchitis, and full of smiles. I got back in there and scanned about for Lucy. She was in the corner, doing that slowly-collapsing dance that Ally Sheedy does in The Breakfast Club – arms up and body shaking, and down to your knees and head to the floor and full-flop into the music. I still had blue-and-yellow knees from doing the same dance with her on Thursday. Carl was giving Paulie a shoulder-rub, sitting on a sofa in the quieter bit round the corner, but then he leapt up when they played California Uber Alles. That song always brings out the shouty man in him, and Lucy too was whooping, all big eyes and making revving-engine noises. Paulie stayed on the sofa, head back and smiling, the first sign that the night was drawing to a close even while it was peaking.

  The doors were locked now and Stella was by the kitchen smoking a fag, talking to Lauren and Mandy. Millie in the football vest hugged me and gave me a blissful kiss, her sweaty face slipping across mine. I dipped my little finger into the little bag of pink MDMA that she cradled close between us like a candle, licked the sharp powder, imagined the powder-pink and the absinthe-green in my belly, a sorcerer’s recipe.

  “Come here!” Carl was yelling. He was on the bar, crouched down, his arms stretched out to me. I went in for a cuddle, into his soft wet neck, but he was pulling me up onto the bar, he wanted us dancing up there together. I couldn’t do it. I thought I might slip, fall, smash my teeth, black my eye, damage myself too much. Embarrassing, stranded, frozen, hopeless. Carl took my arms, just above my elbows, and pulled me up, right up, until I was sitting on the bar. Then I grabbed onto him and he pulled again and I wobbled and we stood upright together between the beer levers and the curved metallic edge.

  “Magic,” he said, and we kissed, first a touch of lips and then a proper ridiculous open-mouth dive-in where your heads airlock together and you really just want to have sex. “That’s my favourite kind of kiss,” I told him. I liked them all, though.

  Paulie had a congregation on his sofa and in the chairs around his table. Stella had her arms around Lauren and Lucy, who were curled either side of her on a wide, comfy chair. Joe and Mandy had four more absinthes, unwatered – one glass each and another lined up waiting. As they talked, fixed into a discussion, they would occasionally dip a forefinger into the glass and lick off the goo, like baby birds being fed or children with a bag of sherbet. Jamie moved and sat on Millie’s lap when we walked over, so Carl and I had a chair to ourselves. I settled in sideways on the arm and he sat squarely down on my feet, his weight and his warmth on my toes.

  It wasn’t all that late, about one o’clock. There’d be a party at Al’s house later, but that wasn’t quite happening yet. We were enjoying a lull between chapters. And anyway the next stage might be to go home, fruity tea and duvet and cleaned teeth and Carl’s smooth warm firm body next to mine.

  Mandy passed us the spare absinthes. “We have spare absinthe,” she said, proud. I leaned over and poured a glass of tap water from the jug on the table, no ice, and I drank it, steady gulps, before I started to sip the absinthe. Like sherry, in its sherry glass, but hotter and better.

  Carl was talking to Paulie, being all earnest and important. “It’s about the fun and loving each other, and the glorious universe we’re all part of, and it’s about being good to each other.”

  Lauren and Lucy, in sync, lifted their heavy, lovel
y heads, regarded my boyfriend with soft smiles. Jamie and Mandy were gazing, half laughing, half swooning at Carl.

  And Carl noticed his audience, turned his head, his shoulders dropped back a bit. “What in life is more important than love and music and friends and dancing?”

  “Fucking hippy,” said Jamie, and then he pushed himself up like a pendulum, tick-tocked straight onto Carl and began to wriggle against Carl’s leg like a horny dog with a new technique.

  “Let’s have a toast!” I shouted, my absinthe held up in the air. “A toast to friends and raving and the glorious universe!”

  “Whoo!” yelled Stella.

  “Ya-oo!” cried Lucy.

  “Love! Love!” said Joe. “Love is all you need!”

  And we drank, then looked around at each other. What to do next? And Paulie went for more drinks.

  Almost everyone did go back to Al’s that night, but I said to Carl, “Are you a bit tired?” and he said, “Are you?” and we set off home together, walking.

  It was the end of May, warm and clear. We were on residential streets, wide and Victorian, solid houses and no one around, just a twenty-minute walk but with record boxes – we’d swap between the big and the little one. Carl began to sing, an old music-hall ditty, he reckoned, that he liked to sing to me like a lullaby for grown-ups.

  “Tiddly winky winky winky, tiddly winky woo, I love you,” he sang in my ear, very quietly at first. Shy, but he wanted to sing it.

  “Tiddly winky winky winky, tiddly winky woo, love me too.” At this point he went a bit Max Wall.

  “I love you in the morning, I love you in the night, I love you in the evening when the stars are shining bright,” which they were.

  “Tiddly winky winky winky, tiddly winky woooo, I looove you (without your bra on), I love you (without your pants on), I love you (without your wig on), I loooooove you.”

  By the end of the ditty he was two or three metres ahead on the pavement, facing me, moving backwards in a slow jig. His feet occasionally kicked one way or the other, and his elbows were poking out. And then he stopped, with knees bent, arms spread, small record box in one hand, shoulders in a shrug, head to one side, eyebrows up in a croon. And I stopped too, and looked at him and smiled, the tired smile of a tired parent.

  We swapped boxes again, so he had the bigger one, the one which would bash against your knee and give you a wooden-leg walk. There wasn’t a car or a dog-walker or a night-bus on the streets. Just me and Carl. He carried the big box the rest of the way, up our front steps and into our flat. “Give me that,” he said as we got through the door, and he put both boxes gently by the stereo, the little one neat and straight in front of the big one.

  “No more booze,” I said. “Let’s have fruit tea and a bath.” Carl went to the kettle and mugs, I went to turn on the taps. Sitting on the side of the bath, I pulled off my clothes, shuffled out of my jeans, didn’t unlace my shoes, just pushed them off with my heels, left it all collapsed there on the floor like I’d been dematerialised, and I watched the water thunder out, just the hot tap. Then the cold, and watching and listening, and I slipped in with the taps still running. Is there anything better than a bath?

  “Shall I wash your back, darling?” Carl asked me. Two blackberry-and-nettle teas on top of the toilet seat. Then “fucking hell, you do look good” and an upside-down kiss, his hand stroking from my cheek and down my neck, between my breasts and down between my legs, around my thigh, his face sinking into me a little, just against my ear.

  I wanted the bath to myself. Carl sat on the floor against the radiator, a towel across his knee and another folded behind his head. He was humming that Tiddly song, very slowly, and watching me. From where he sat he could see just my face and my legs. He didn’t wash my back but sometimes he would lean forwards and stroke down my leg, and sometimes he would lean over and take a sip of his tea. My toes reached the taps, one hot toe and one cold toe, made squeaky noises.

  “What are you thinking about?” he asked me, one word after another.

  “I’m thinking about men and cock and not being dead,” I said. My arms were up above my head, fingers exploring my damp hair and sweaty scalp.

  “I’d love to fuck you now,” he told me. He had such a sweet voice. “You’re beautiful.”

  “I’m tired.”

  I am special and I will not die, I thought. I will keep the end at bay with a constant shuffling of men and possibilities. To be in love would be some kind of death.

  I looked at Carl, took an inventory of his face, of him. His hair was pale gold-brown and tufty, his skin was lightly freckled. His cheekbones were so delicate but he had this thick, serious brow. His T-shirt was baggy around the neck so I could see a bit of his collarbone. His big bottom lip was sucked in under his front teeth. His eyes were fixed somewhere near my feet.

  The bath felt cold. I thought about putting some more hot water in but then I pulled the plug out, just hooked my toe around the chain and tugged.

  ‌Good Solid Obliterating Fuck

  I met Proust, more or less, on the train from Aberdeen to London in 2001. He wasn’t called Marcel, as far as I know, and he was better-looking than Proust, but he was dreamy and kind and slim, with these long elegant fingers and soft high cheekbones, and he talked in long beautiful sentences where I would forget by the time he got to the end, got to where the full stop might be, what he had started with and what the actual point of the sentence could be; who is doing the thing that is being done in this sentence, and when were they doing it, and what does it relate to, why are you telling me? And I didn’t mind the forgetting, because it’s not a police statement, you know, it’s a story.

  I’d been dozing when the man sat down opposite me, because I do tend to fall asleep on trains. I was snuggled up and softly snoozing. I dreamt of my old schoolfriends Lisa and Janey. They were sitting across the table from me and it felt familiar as well as a bit strange because I hadn’t seen them in years, and what had we missed? We chatted for a while and they invited me to join them on a daytrip to the seaside – faraway tides and long beaches, and a very good crabshack apparently. We could take some more time to catch up, update biographical details, remember habits and expressions, remember how much we like each other and why. I didn’t want to go, but I was glad to be asked.

  In the dream, Lisa was wearing this white dress that she used to love, off-white really, secondhand but pristine, soft, cotton, buttons, pockets, easy, simple. The feeling of it. I would like to hold onto that dress like a Linus blanket, like a child with her mother’s skirt, like a lover in a cliche gripping the sheet while she gets a really good solid obliterating fuck.

  Then the man sat down, diagonally opposite me, and that woke me up although I didn’t move. He gave me a quick nod. He was handsome. I gave a little nod in return. The handsome Prousty man sat down opposite me on the train. I liked that, and I dozed off again. And then the man was in my dream, I think, although I’m not certain.

  Next time I woke up there was a bit of dribble at the corner of my mouth. The handsome man didn’t seem to have noticed, but then he shuffled sideways out of his seat, stood up, and looked at me.

  “Do you want anything from the buffet car?”

  Well, now, isn’t that an old-fashioned term for it? Buffet car.

  I would love a cup of tea, I told him, straight in, as if he offered me a brew every morning. I didn’t mean to whisper but I did because my lips were dry and my throat was claggy from sleeping.

  And when he came back with a cup of tea and a Kitkat I found it borderline creepy, because I hadn’t said anything about wanting a chocolate bar, but the truth is that I also really fancied a Kitkat, so there we were. I felt, for a second, as if I knew him.

  “I was at the festival too,” he told me.

  Ah, so he was. The film festival I’d been at for the past three days, working, shmoozing.

  “I’m not quite awake,” I told him. “But I knew I recognised you from somewhere.”

  �
��We were at the same screening of Beau Travail. Sitting on the same row, I think.”

  “Oh my god,” I remembered the film, the wonderful film. “Those men, those bodies.”

  “Those bodies,” he sighed. “And isn’t it compelling, those bodies moving in the heat, moving in space, not outer space-space, of course, I mean in the Djibouti desert-space, moving and sweating, almost like synchronised swimmers! And there was something so exquisite and so heartbreaking as well as sexy, utterly sexy, about the dynamics between them, seeing them helpless really as they get tangled up in those pulsing rivalries.”

  “I love a bit of male rivalry,” I told him. “Especially when it’s under a female gaze.”

  “Because that makes a nice change, you mean?”

  “Oh, I suppose so. That’s quite petty, isn’t it? A pathetic sort of equality.”

  “It’s fair enough, though. No pun intended. And she is an amazing director.”

  “Thanks for the tea.”

  I offered him money, he didn’t want money, he said I could get the next one if I liked and then he pulled a tiny face, a shy little grimace, because he realised there was something cheesy about mentioning the next cup of tea we have together, something he hadn’t really intended about suggesting that we will have other cups of tea together, just the two of us.

  “What is the French Foreign Legion, exactly?” I was thinking about the film again, those men. “I just imagine it as pirates but on land.”

  “And a bit like the circus,” he said. “In the sense that you go off and join it.”

  “‘He went off and joined the French Foreign Legion.’ When was that a saying? It was a saying, wasn’t it?”

  He thought about that for a minute, this handsome man with his delicate features. “I feel like there was a time when young men just disappeared, just upped and left. And what would you say? What do you say about that?”

  “Women join the circus, men get the French Foreign Legion?”