Friction (3 page)

Clap. Clap. Clap. Clap.

In Johnny's eyes Rebecca is the vanguard of the proletariat, with an intimidating set of tits to match. She stretches out in the sun and his eyes roll like marbles down the mysterious contours of her body. He barely knows what a tit is. Can't really imagine one, its consistency, its texture.

‘When I graduate, I think I'd like to teach in a prison,' says Rebecca, uprooting clumps of grass and placing them on the inch of flesh that is revealed between her shirt and her skirt. When I graduate I'd like to be that little clump of grass, thinks Johnny, like little green pubes. I'd like to be natural. I'd like to hide where your buttocks meet your thighs and not be found.

‘Definitely,' continues Rebecca, absently brushing away the grass, ‘I'd really like to work with sex offenders, get inside their heads.'

Just as Johnny's trying to work out what sexual offence he could commit so as to land Rebecca as his teacher, the sun disappears behind a cloud and a football bounces between the two of them and comes to rest. It becomes noticeably
colder. A wind blows. I'm not capable of rape, thinks Johnny. Can you go to prison for simply staring at girls?

Johnny drifts off, wondering whether wolf-whistling is a sex crime. Rebecca looks to where the football came from and watches as a young man begins to jog in their direction. She smiles. It wouldn't cross Johnny's mind to kick the ball back. He couldn't kick air.

The jogging boy wears no top; his pectoral muscles jump fiercely up and down with every foot that hits the ground. Rebecca scans down his body to the neatly tensed six-pack, the seams of his perfectly baggy shorts, sharp shins flanked by calf, trainered feet, dancing laces. Rebecca gets a lurching feeling. A sense of being alive and a sense of being fooled.

‘I feel sick,' she says suddenly, ‘what's that smell?' Rebecca knows. She has smelt the danger, seen it in the lines that define the muscles of young men's chests.

‘I'll never be a sex offender,' says Johnny, noticing the football for the first time and wincing at its muddy, worn leather, at it horrendous kinetic potential. He sees the boy, too, and turns away.

Rebecca doesn't. Her eyes are on the football. It moved. Slightly. The seams that bind the pentagons of black and white leather begin to prise apart. Rebecca sits up. The football is mouthing something to her, trying to communicate, an expression of terrible fear on its kicked and muddied face. Thudding footsteps get louder. The boy arrives, the skin that binds his skeleton tensing and relaxing with his gasping mouth.

‘Sorry,' he says, addressing Rebecca. Johnny looks at the young man's face and instinctively raises a hand to his own, running it across the bloody terrain of his cheeks. He returns his eyes to the ground, which he gouges with a stick.

‘No problem,' says Rebecca, rolling the ball towards the young man's feet but not wishing to look at it, in case it starts talking again. She doesn't wish to be warned or persuaded by a football. It wouldn't be right. The boy runs the sole of his shoe over the ball and begins dribbling in the direction of his friends, hoofing it towards them after a few metres and running on.

His eyes, thinks Johnny, recalling how the young man had observed Rebecca, did his eyes get erections?

‘You OK, Johnny?' asks Rebecca, taking a tissue from her bag.

Is this how it has to be, thinks Johnny, sex sewn into my brain, like air inside a ball? It's Rebecca, he thinks, she's making my brain go red. Johnny turns to Rebecca with a smile pulled across his face like a zip. Gentle Johnny, a sex offender? No. His brain blushes. He's only joking: ‘Tonight, Rebecca, I'm going to drill a drizzly minge!'

‘Pardon?'

‘I'm going to hammer away at a twat!'

Rebecca gets up from the grass. She's offended. A twat? She's not laughing. She's frowning, a tissue held against her face. What would Johnny want with a twat? thinks Rebecca. What's the smell? Is it the stench of young men thinking?

The bullshit is carried on the breeze. Rebecca and Johnny both sense danger. Sense that a previously perfect system of interlocking shapes has somehow fallen out of synch and that this spells trouble. Rebecca brushes grass and dried earth from her long khaki skirt and turns to observe the group of footballing boys. They're crowding around a hedge, poking at it with long sticks, retreating cautiously after each jab. The football has rolled into a wasps' nest.

WE CAN'T STAND
still. We don't wear rollerblades. We have more characters to meet. Last night the air was stuffy, as ever, stuffy with sirens, shouts and short skirts. Rented limousines crawled through the city centre, from Corporation Street, down Cross Street, Deansgate, through Castlefield. Drinks flow in England. Weekends arrive with gifts for the thirsty, leaving behind only trickles of piss.

Boy 1 and Boy 2 meet at ‘The Bar' for lunch at three o'clock. The Bar, pronounced ‘Thee Bar', is not quite
the
bar to frequent, but as franchises go, it's good. Boy 1 takes a steak sandwich and Boy 2 takes a BLT. The steak sandwich, as it must from 1998 onwards, contains caramelised red onion. Caramelised red onion is seen as really, really delicious. Boy 1 wants to be rich, he wants to be fucking rock and he wants the high life: red onions, houmous, focaccia, fit-as-fuck bird. Food having been consumed, both boys are left feeling powerful. The weekend looms above them dressed in hilarious drag, it offers them its creased and open palm.

At five o'clock the lager living begins. The lager loving begins. Boy 1 goes to the bar, returning with two pints of Stella and a handful of change. At first it's moderate, the drinking. But subtle sips give way to greedy gulps and their hearts begin to darken. After four pints they begin to piss and a banal chaos starts up; neither can go half a pint without jogging to the bogs and spraying into the urinal, a clenched fist held against the white tiled walls for support. At seven o'clock a fleeting lethargy hits them both and the subject of Colin is raised.

‘We should call him,' says Boy 2, belatedly tugging up his flies.

‘Should we?' Boy 1 replies, his eyes fixed on the girls that by now are pouring into The Bar.

‘Yeh, man, we should.'

Colin is heading down Sackville Street when his phone vibrates in his pocket and he comes to a stop. The display glows against the night, the words ‘Boy 2' flashing across the middle. Answer?

‘You sound fucked,' says Colin, as the lager-lipped tone of Boy 2's voice creeps from the earpiece. Colin agrees to join the two boys at The Bar. He does this reluctantly, because he has to. He does this because, nowadays, opting out of social occasions is a form of self-mutilation. The social is everything. Colin suspects that when removed from the glass gazes of others, he is nothing. And it hurts.

Colin ends the call, turns around and starts walking in the direction of The Bar. He temps at the University of Manchester, admin for the English Department. Having worked late, he is still in his work clothes. Don't worry. Luckily for Colin, the sartorial code at the university is
pretty casual. He's wearing a pair of smart jeans and a well-ironed blue shirt. (Apart from the odd, short-lived experiment with the idea of an intentionally creased shirt, by about 2004, the well-ironed shirt has achieved supremacy.) Colin skips onto Whitworth Street, past the croaking, toad-like building of Oxford Road train station and on towards south Deansgate and The Bar.

He crosses one of the many wooden bridges that lead on to Deansgate Locks. The Bar looms, its cheap sign lit up, its doorway cordoned off with red rope and brass stands. It's getting busier.

There are plenty of couples. Colin's head begins to spin. The couple is still going strong. There are long tanned legs, bunches of birds that you could screw up, smash, straightening their limbs with red hot tongs. Spinning fast. Lovely arses for Colin to look at coldly. Couples seem vile to Colin. These men and women are the wettest, most vile, idiotic, sick, compromised cowards he's ever seen. He looks at beefed-up men like they're hideous idiots, preoccupied with some misunderstood idea. Cocks. Colin doesn't want a bird, fit as fuck or not. But he'd burn the clothes of these turd-tanned slappers, burn their push-up bras off their bodies just to show them. Colin's girlfriend left him a year ago and, at this stage, he isn't sure whether he'll ever be able to have sex again. He pays at the door, entering the club that The Bar has become.

The majestic boozers of this damp century wade around the dance floor. It's dark but the room is full of psychedelic drinks: girls and boy sucking on neon liquids, pouring golden fluid, animated by flashing lights and colours, down their throats and into their stomachs.

This is what we people live for, a lot of us think. Great
times. Great times. The music is running as fast as it can and the dance floor is heaving with fabrics and different skins. The place is burnt hollow with cleavage, with skirts short enough to reveal the beginnings of hard, curved bums. There are tight T-shirts, see-through tops, muscles, perfectly ironed shirts of white, of red, of blue. Oh, they drink a shitload, they do. These are those who will live and die but this is a generation that mustn't get old; so great is its responsibility to the nihilism of its youth. Colin waits fifteen minutes for a pint of Stella and joins Boy 1 and Boy 2 at the edge of the dance floor.

‘All right, mate!'

‘Yeh!'

‘How was work?'

‘Fine. You're fucking wasted!'

‘We've been here all day!'

These three are idle young men. This is a room full of idle young men in pursuit of idle young women in pursuit of idle young men. Cyclical and unchanging. Paceless. Anger warms and finally burns. It creeps up on you on the dance floor or outside the club. It ruins your night, then is thrown off and forgotten in the course of some restless, semi-comatose sleep. Sex is some hard-throated bout of power play. Girls and boys passing time. Staring, looking, touching, fucking, leaving, missing, abandoning, living, trying and fucking up and trying again, anal, stopping, taxi-rank fights, bus blow jobs, orgasms, excitement, experimentation, fetish and a frantic smell of spermicide.

Boy 1 and Boy 2 sway on the dance floor, stumbling in the direction of tits, their gelled hair the texture of barbed wire. Colin watches with a choking throat and dried-up eyes as the rest of the club work themselves up into a frenzy,
pair off, fight and leave. Colin is a granite statue with flickering marble eyes. He surveys the girls. He weighs them, unwraps them, cuts and prices them. It's slaughter, quick, it's slaughter.

‘Look at her.'

‘That twat's pointing at me.'

‘Come on.'

‘Knockers. Quick, fuck. Look at the knockers.'

‘I've got no chance.'

Somewhere among the lights, fun is located, invisible to the untrained eye. This is the age of excess, of silence, of stillness, of getting fucked up, of inebriated and uninhibited sex or hard morning wanks. This is the age of cash and waste.

At around midnight Colin seeks refuge in a toilet cubicle, leaving Boys 1 and 2 on the dance floor. He takes a piss and then lowers the toilet seat and the lid, wiping away the residue of cocaine and urine before sitting down and resting his elbows on his knees. The music is muffled but still seems deafening. ‘Y2K' reads a note on the door, graffiti, ‘Y2K: Kev fucked Sal.' What became of that moment? thinks Colin, noticing a pair of black brogues entering the adjacent cubicle. What became of Kev? He fucked Sal, of course, but then what? What did Sal and Kev do afterwards? Dance, maybe, yes, thinks Colin, Kev danced with a dirty dick, and Sal with an altered minge.

Colin falls forwards on to the wet floor, turning and lifting the lid, vomiting an odorous yellow into the toilet water.

‘You all right in there, mate?'

Am I all right in here? Colin wipes a hand across his mouth. It's decay, he thinks, pinching his Adam's apple
between his fingers and thumb. It's some fucked-up decay. He looks down; the toilet lets out a deep, gurgling belly laugh.

‘All right, son, out you come.'

Colin looks up to see a very white face staring down at him over the divide. A very large fat face, the telling shine of black bomber jacket beyond its neck. A bouncer. Bollocks. A bouncer balancing on next door's toilet. Colin sighs. The bouncer jumps off the toilet and comes round to meet Colin as he leaves the cubicle.

‘Let's go, sunshine.'

With a fat white hand on each shoulder, Colin is pushed slowly through The Bar. The crowd parts in front of him. Wankers turn to watch. Bitches whisper and Colin finds himself outside with Boys 1 and 2.

‘You've been chucked out, too?' he says, straightening his collar. ‘What for?'

‘Fighting,' says Boy 2, quietly into his sleeve.

‘Wanking,' screams Boy 1, over his shoulder, running quickly towards a bus.

The following morning. Colin suggests that they all eat breakfast at the hospital. The others follow for one important reason: for the hell of it. They walk from Boy 2's flat in Victoria Park to the Infirmary off Oxford Road by the University of Manchester. On the second floor they find the Wishing Well, a grim cafeteria where the light is the yellow of vomit and the air is always grey. The pregnant and the dying shuffle here, trays in their hands, hair terrified by nocturnal static.

All three boys order English breakfasts. Since being guided from The Bar last night, Colin is sure that something has
changed. That the intricate pipes of his brain have been tampered with, or one little tube has slumped accidentally from its socket and has begun to leak into his open skull, closing off a hemisphere of feeling and thought.

‘I can't be arsed going out any more. All those wankers, chasing cunts – I can't be fucked with that.' Colin watches Boys 1 and 2 closely. His veins seem to course with fizzy blood. Or something bitter, perhaps. Boy 2 forks an entire sausage with one jab and allows it to hover in front of his face.