Friction (2 page)

‘How much?' he says at last. ‘How much am I getting?'

The drinks arrive and Justin gulps immediately from his White Russian, his eyes fixed on his mother, who beams at her bruschetta and blushes as the waiter pours her water. Justin's blood begins to simmer: the bruschetta won't stop flirting with his mum. The little chunks of tomato won't stop winking at her, the bread's nodding suggestively. Typical, thinks Justin, she's going to fuck her starter.

‘How much am I getting?' he asks again, as his mother's glossed lips meet the machine-washed metal of her fork. But Diane's eyes close, her jaw munches in a circle, her lips scrunched, humming approval.

Why did I shag two girls who were so alike? thinks Justin, turning to where the summer light is brightened by the restaurant's large windows. They were on the same course
at university, both fascinated by Virginia Woolf. He recalls the moment he realised they'd found out. He watched as they exited the Union Building on Oxford Road and approached him. He remembers their similar strides, their folders held tightly to their chests, the same purple betrayal in their eyes.

‘I thought they were the same girl!' he says, suddenly, out loud.

‘Pardon?' coughs Diane, a chunk of tomato dropping to the floor, causing her cheeks to redden. She swallows hard then says, ‘Sixty thousand pounds, you'll get sixty thousand pounds.' A leaf of basil stumbles knackered on to Diane's bottom lip and Justin concludes that his life has changed course. He downs his cocktail in one. It's gone, he thinks. It has ended or it has begun. I need to find new ways of having sex.

YOU'RE YOU AND
I'm me. Neither of us is Steve. Steve is twisting in his bed, eyes squinting, preparing to once again behold the immaculate glory of his Green Quarter apartment. Beside Steve is Carly, the girlfriend, twisting too. Both were battered last night, hammered at the bar. Both returned home with zig-zag legs and zig-zag tongues and began doting on each other. Too much drinking. Sex with no clothes on. Life with no legs on.

Steve's eyes open: two used condoms gossip about him beside the bed, one filled and tied, the other untied and containing only a squirt. British boys have British brains, the texture of a mushroom. They can be prised apart like fruit. His throat is the asphalt of a car park.

Steve lifts himself up on to his elbows, exhaling loudly as he does so. His hair is bleached blonde, though memories of its original black streak through it. This is fashion. Steve's haircut cost sixty quid and is a constant source of pride. As is the room that surrounds him: the excellent stereo, the cool wardrobe containing brilliant
clothes, the skirting boards painted Duck Egg Blue, the fit girlfriend.

‘I feel like shit,' he observes, sitting up completely, breathing into his cupped hands and then recoiling in disgust. ‘My breath stinks of shit,' he adds.

Steve glances again at the condoms beside the bed; they're still whispering to each other. Discussing, no doubt, their experiences of a few hours earlier. Steve had torn their foil wrappers with his teeth and slid them on to his marauding cock. I was great, thinks Steve, turning to Carly who lies beside him, both times I was brilliant.

‘I'm not going to work,' says Carly, stirring. ‘I'm still fucked.' Her right hand creeps across the covers towards a packet of cigarettes on the bedside table; it fumbles open the lid and removes a fag, shaking the packet on to the floor as it does so. Her hand then returns to her face and places the fag between her lips. She can't be bothered to light it. It remains unlit. Carly works in a shoe shop. She and Steve have been together for two years.

‘I can't believe my arse is still trendy,' says Carly, the fag bouncing in her dry lips, her voice muffled. ‘It's such good news.'

Steve nods. ‘Yeh, it is good news.'

For weeks Carly has been fretting about her arse. She's been craning her neck to get a proper look at it, chasing her buttocks round and round like a dog chases its tail. Ever since she saw a late-night documentary suggesting that arse fashion was changing, she's been shitting it. Her bottom is small and compact, whereas the programme suggested that bigger and more rounded bums were marching into fashion. She was devastated, ordered Steve to take a photo with his phone and spent a day staring at her denim behind,
imploring it to stay in fashion. It did. Although not before Carly had investigated the surgical options on the Internet and decided she'd get her arse enlarged if it meant remaining fit. Eager to prevent this, Steve did his own research, concluding that the programme was really just reflecting African American tastes and that the British bottom was likely to remain untouched. Last night they celebrated this news. Carly wore a boob tube and a very short skirt.

One thing's for sure nowadays, you can't beat a sexy girl. One that is as fit as fuck. Steve doesn't know any man who can resist a girl who is as fit as fuck. And Carly, who twists awkwardly beside him in bed, is exactly that. She is precisely as fit as fuck. Her face is open, its features perfectly spaced and in total agreement. Her breasts bob and flirt with physics. Her hair is a rich brown and journeys down over her shoulders before curling perfectly above each nipple.

‘You spanked me last night, didn't you, baby?' asks Carly, sitting up finally and reaching for her lighter.

‘Yes.'

There's a spark and the fag is lit. Carly spits out the first uninhaled cloud of white and smiles. ‘Thank you.'

It was exactly Carly's beauty that ended Steve's ambitions. Two years ago he was about to start work on an MA thesis, investigating the merits of globalisation. But then a door opened in a bar on Deansgate and Carly walked through it. Steve froze. Ambition puffed fart-like from his arse. He put down his drink and approached her. The conversation was twenty seconds old when Steve discovered that Carly had just one interest: money. He sighed, wafted the odour of his ambition from his nostrils and simply changed his mind, cancelled his MA and started independently investing on the stock market. So came style,
the sixty-pound haircuts, the fajitas and the goats' cheese, the lifting of weights and the financing of Carly's sprees.

To be a shagger of others, particularly a shagger of girls like Carly, demands sacrifice. So it is that Steve smiles carefully when she returns from town with numerous shopping bags, or when she points her finger at certain garments in various catalogues. He doesn't complain. Carly is a choice: the glorious twenty-first-century choice between fantasy and mind. Carly makes Steve feel exactly like a man. Extremely like a man. A cock god, a swordsman, a sexpert, etc.

‘How many times was it last night, Stevie?'

Steve listens as the condoms titter below. ‘Twice,' he says, turning away from Carly's smoke and shutting his eyes tight.

‘I could go all night. Really. I could fuck all day,' says Carly, stubbing out her fag and reaching round Steve's arse cheeks to where his cock and balls discuss the meaning of life. She gently jigs his webbed testicles, taps at his cock until it moves like a flag flown in mourning, to half-mast.

‘I'm not going on top.'

‘I'm too fucked.'

‘Just wank me off.'

This is life. This is glorious life. There is a burst of activity as Carly drags Steve on to his back and makes for his middle. She gets herself into a comfortable position and, with a soft grip, begins to wank him off, as agreed. One thing has been proved: boys love friction, and being wanked off by a girl is the easiest source of it. It's stress free, guilt free, and needn't be repaid. Unlike a blow job, which is worldsplittingly political and requires a measured, softly spoken diplomacy. Carly's strokes begin to get more vigorous and Steve feels he owes her nothing.

An area of the blue duvet is going up and down like a fast heart beating under thin skin. Steve's eyes shut, capturing situations of sex inside his head. A mixture of fantasy and icicled reality: the begging eyes of a conquered female, the round African American arses he clocked on the web, the merits of globalisation, a pop star round his cock, a film star at his balls.

It's as if all Steve has are his looks, which are so good they virtually guarantee him intercourse with any girl in the Western world. Lots and lots of lifting weights occupy a great deal of Steve's time on earth. Up and down, making his body bigger and bigger. He's changing and, deep down, he blames Carly, he reckons she makes him less refined. Carly doesn't give a shit.

She thinks of products as her wrist moves up and down. She pictures clothes. She sees lifestyle in her hand: ripped jeans, stiletto heels, her tortilla palm wrapped round alert cock.

There is a desperate silence in this room, broken only by Steve's silly groans. He knows it. She knows it. The condoms beside the bed know it. The sewers are rising.

SOUTH FROM CENTRAL
Manchester down Oxford Road gets you to Fallowfield. Two gloriously young students, Johnny and Rebecca, enter Platt Fields Park with their arms loosely linked. They're not lovers. Linking arms is very popular in the early twenty-first century, even amongst friends. Today the sun is scarlet and the sky seems almost green. A young man glides by on rollerblades, headphones in his ears, swaying from side to side. Rollerblading is getting less popular these days. Never trust a rollerblader. They're a bunch of fucking nihilists. They don't believe in anything.

Johnny and Rebecca are wearing shoes. Rebecca watches their pacing feet through aviator shades, the ice-cold sweat from Johnny's T-shirt is troubling her naked arm. ‘The lads in my flat have stuck porn all over the kitchen wall,' she says, disentangling her arm from Johnny's and brushing it gently with her palm.

Johnny is crap at replying. So he doesn't. He simply allows his awkward, stooping posture to become more extreme. The mere mention of pornography causes the
teeth of his brain to chatter. He can't imagine porn. Has never seen it. Loosely linking arms with Rebecca is as close as Johnny has come to sex. And now our arms are no longer linked, he notices. Because of my sweat, he concludes, she disliked the cold, wet sensation of my sweat.

‘It's a real montage. Hardcore on almost every wall. It strikes me as rather odd. What were they thinking?'

The path ahead of them ends and opens out into a large expanse of grass. Fellow students roll around with each other, some read in the shade of trees. Boys kick footballs to each other over long distances. Johnny takes his chance and sprints ahead of Rebecca.

‘Where are you going?'

Johnny's crap at replying so he just runs off. Rebecca watches as he escapes towards a tree. He climbs it quickly and hangs from a branch. Rebecca is Johnny's only friend. She knows this. That's why she sets aside time to walk with him or cook him dinner. For Johnny has an ugly little face, friendly, but so unfortunate. His features positioned like darts thrown drunkenly at a board. His eyes like underwater organisms, forced to breathe the air. Hanging from a tree, the large discs of sweat under each of his arms are conspicuous. His frame is long and gangly; he's what people call a lanky bastard. Certainly, he's a lanky bastard. Limbs like lengths of inflexible rope.

‘I am the Milky Bar Kid!' shouts Johnny, swinging in the breeze, his voice retaining its adolescent croak. ‘The Milky Bar Kid is strong and tough. He is a figment of the male imagination!' Johnny only ever speaks in joke.

Rebecca passes the tree, smiling, embarrassed. She is short in stature, her body contains curves, her haircut is a sedate chestnut bob and her face is a face, a pretty one, soft,
as if shielded by a light mist. She watches as Johnny drops from the branch and accidentally crumples into a small heap. He has the knees of a child; muddy and many-sided. He ambles after Rebecca with the unfortunate lurching movements of doomed youth.

Johnny, of course, is in love with Rebecca. On the first day of term he tripped and fell at her feet. Her ankles, Jesus, thighs, the darkness up her skirt, in love, instantly. His little mind is full of her and his little heart is full of arrows. Her cleavage; it reminds him of not breathing. But he's a lanky bastard. He has unfashionable genes. Fucked about by fate. A colourful acne flows from ear to ear.

‘I don't understand it. What am I meant to believe is in your mind, Johnny? I mean men, in general?'

Johnny's mind contains broken swings and a knackered roundabout around which tracksuited villains sip cider, throw stones and make him think and do stupid things. Especially around Rebecca.

‘Men are rank, really, men are really rank,' says Rebecca, finding a place on the grass and falling backwards into it. She's thoughtful. Wonderful. A full middle-class figure that speaks of swimming lessons, trips to France, passing your driving test and being rewarded with a car. Beside her, Johnny is attempting to sit down. But he's not even cool enough to sit, can't find where to put his legs. He can be quite funny, I suppose, but beyond that his talents are eating, shitting, getting ill and breathing.

One of the things that Johnny loves about Rebecca is her mild political commitment. This consists of her making one or both of the following points on a monthly basis, usually on occasions of personal failure or moderate fatigue.

Point one: ‘How, Johnny, can we inhabit a planet where
half the population is starving, and the other half is deliberately starving themselves?'

Point two: ‘[Politician A] is only interested in creating a context in which [multinational corporation X] can successfully and safely establish factories in [poor country Y], the guy doesn't give a fuck about human rights, just free fucking trade.'

Point one is actually more of a question, albeit rhetorical, so as compensation here's the usual extension of point two: ‘I'll tell you something, Johnny, free trade has got nothing to do with freedom.'

This more than constitutes profundity in many of man's days and ages. Rebecca is to be applauded for her efforts.