Friction (7 page)

He forced her away, wore her down, isolated her with quiet. On reflection, Colin has always been infested, has always had an uneasy grasp of silence and slow anger. Marion certainly saw it, was even attracted to it in the early days. Colin is the boy with the look of unease, the element of doubt. Lonely and inarticulate, he moves effortlessly with the crowd. Marion ran because she saw too much. Saw he was getting worse. First was the drinking. Then the inaudible, stationary rage.

He hasn't had sex since Marion. Her body gradually and almost cunningly became repulsive to him. It happened so slowly he couldn't work out what was going on. Small nuances in her configuration subtly evolved into things that made him breathless with revulsion. His mind was constantly playing tricks on him. He remembers her attempts to turn him on: the lingerie, the words, the caresses and the look in her eye, unknowing and humiliated. He also recalls her fear and her collapsed body on the kitchen floor.

Colin's friends remember the day he recovered. They'd been aware that he'd been going through a tough time. Marion had told them about his strange and overwhelming moods, his inability to speak or touch. About a month after Marion left, Colin seemed fine again. Less prone to those long silences that would envelop entire rooms until you could hear a pin drop. He started phoning people again, Boy 1 and Boy 2. He went out for drinks with them, picked up kebabs on the way home, watched the football in the pub on Saturday. He had no interest in girls, but that was
his right. Sure it was, not everyone has to be into girls. Gay men, for example. Yes, he was happy to just have a drink.

Now, Colin looks like just another idle lad. Does fuck all but who gives a fuck? He works, as we know, in a departmental office at the university. Colin is disguised; Colin is private. He irons his shirts, washes thoroughly each morning, keeps up with the fashions of the high street. Colin appears normal, is normal, hurting, rotten to the core.

Beep beep beep. Beep beep beep. Beep beep beep. Beep beep beep. Beep beep beep.

His minute's up. Fastest minute of my life, he thinks, as he leaves his bed and picks his way across the room to the door.

Colin's glad to get out of his bedroom, glad to get to the shower where there's fresh water and a more optimistic light. He lives in Withington, south Manchester. He always pays his bills on time. He has a highly strung, rakish frame. Resting between his nipples is a thatch of black hair, the texture of dried earth.

He gets out of the shower and dries himself with a thin yellow towel. Having sprayed each grizzly pit, he puts on those of his clothes which are already clean and ironed. Underwear, socks and a pale blue Hugo Boss shirt. He walks downstairs, erects the ironing board and turns on the TV.

It's morning. Morning TV is on. Currently, a man is being interviewed by two greying, playfully obese presenters. The man has written a book on body language and has a face that seems entirely comprised of pink soap. Body language is a very fashionable subject in the twenty-first century. The idea being that the way we move our bodies says a lot about who we are, why we succeed and
why we fail. This guy is all hands, limbs and smile, a voice that sounds like a trumpet slurring the notes of some major arpeggio. He's sitting forward on the soft couch, eagerly and expressively making his points, trying, no doubt, to tell us he's a tit.

‘You'd be amazed by what I've learnt about you in the past five minutes, Jemima.'

‘Would I?'

‘Yes, you would.'

‘Oh goodness, I dread to think.'

‘You'd be amazed how naked our behaviour makes us. Your movements will always betray your mind.'

‘Oh, I feel so embarrassed. Am I really so transparent?'

‘Yes, I'm afraid you are.'

The guy reckons he can discover what a person's like in bed just by shaking their hands. Dominant, submissive, playful, shit. Shake my hand, thinks Colin, shake my fucking hand, you twat. Of course, the guy can't, because he's on TV. Too bad, thinks Colin, looking down at his hand. It's gripping the iron, smoothly guiding it over his jeans. What does this mean?

‘Tits,' says Colin to himself. The iron hisses steam and Colin coughs into his fist. ‘Nothing,' he says, continuing to iron.

Along with football, bird-shagging is a major national pastime; it's odd that Colin no longer gets involved. He tries to ignore his feelings. He remembers Marion's cellulite. How it began to shimmer and quiver on her thighs towards the end of their time together. How it reminded him of enormous blisters; the scars that the victims of fire are left with. She had tried so hard to win him back. She bought gels from Versus, toys, videos. She had pleaded, bent herself
over the kitchen table and pulled up her skirt. ‘Fuck me, Colin. Teach me a lesson.'

With every effort Marion made, Colin got colder and colder. As if he was just some debris drifting in space; an old flag or a piece from a shuttle, floating away from the world of touch and love. He's barely been touched since Marion, even the bouncer had held him by the collar while escorting him from The Bar. Occasionally someone will brush past him in a busy place, or he'll be forced to shake the hand of a new colleague at work. But apart from the odd social nicety, Colin remains completely untouched.

Jeans still warm from the iron, Colin is walking down Wilmslow Road towards the bus stop. It'll be hot today. Chesty vests, mini skirts, what is he missing? Even the most slender and beautiful of girls leave him with an inexplicable rage. Is it simply a question of hatred? Does he simply hate women because they're stupid, weak and shallow? He's not sure, and in truth, you can care about these mysteries too much. Fuck it. Live with it.

Oxford Road is bathed in early morning sun. Students on voguishly battered bikes weave between the buses. Colin drifts. The Wishing Well has been on his mind since he ate there yesterday morning, with Boy 1 and Boy 2. If he looks east, out towards Upper Brook Street, he can just make out the glass structure of the hospital. But the hospital has to wait. He takes a short cut through a car park behind the Union building, avoiding the crowds of chilled idiots that slouch around the front door. He manages to get to his building without encountering youth. But the Wishing Well, yes, he's desperate to dine there again.

Because pregnancy is on Colin's mind. He's never really considered the reality of childbirth before, and in some
small way, believes he couldn't possibly have been pushed into the world from his mother's womb. He climbs the stairs of the Arts Faculty, oblivious to the girls, thinking only of the women at the Wishing Well. Their bellies like Allied helmets of the Second World War. Their horse-head tits. The children living inside them; shouldn't we all be a little bit more amazed by this? he thinks. Those women walk differently, they lean back in order to bear the weight of their baby. Colin likes their slippers and their moth-eaten dressing gowns. He feels, perhaps, that they possess a rare kind of honour.

‘Hello,' he says, as he enters the office, making for the relative sanctuary of his desk, as if under gunfire. It is certainly summer. There's not too much work to be done at the university, a bit of prep but nothing too strenuous. Not until the term starts again in September.

‘Hello.'

‘Hello, Colin.'

His colleagues: a selection of dreary objects with whom he shares nothing, not even the petty ennui that the job offers them. A job is a job, believes Colin.

‘Lovely weather today.'

True enough. Colin boots up his computer and flicks through a pile of questionnaires returned to him by the boys and girls starting university in September. Fresh meat, as they're known in the office. Today will be spent feeding this information into a spreadsheet. Names, hobbies, dates of birth, preferred course and living arrangements. Colin will fulfil his duties to the best of his ability. He never complains. His mind will not wander and his breaks will not exceed their permitted duration. He will not say a word.

At six o'clock, just as he's preparing to leave, a girl called Rebecca will come in to sort out a problem with the Dostoevsky module. He will watch the episode with eyes of glass. Snobby bitch, he will think. Slag.

STEVE IS STILL
in bed, wanked off where we left him. It's my fault. I'm letting time get the better of me. The characters are streaming off into different zones. We should have worn rollerblades, you and I, given ourselves a better chance of keeping up with these various unfortunates. Of course, as we return to Steve, Carly is being seduced by a sex machine in one of the cubicles of Versus. We know this. Steve does not. Such is life.

It's almost midday by the time Steve wakes up. A block of sunlight lies on the floor beside the bed; the used condoms bathe in it like a couple of nattering holiday makers. Steve looks towards his bureau, its top drawer ajar. She's robbed me again, he quickly concludes, Carly has robbed me again.

Steve has given the matter some thought, he's calculated that ejaculation perpetrated by Carly results in a five-minute period during which he is drawn to her, loves her and is inclined to cherish the girl. But then it fades. It faded as he drifted inevitably back to sleep, emptied and content. Steve
can imagine a time when this feeling of affection fades almost instantly. He will ejaculate, experience a fleeting moment of affection, then nothing. The flash of something close to love dissolves. A bark of romance, then suddenly nothing at all.

Steve jumps from his bed and shuts the drawer of his bureau. Carly robs him regularly. She robs him because she loves to shop, because Steve is her fit, rich boyfriend and can afford to be robbed. Steve, mostly, allows the robberies to go unnoticed. For Carly is his fit-as-fuck girlfriend and therefore must, he supposes, be granted certain privileges. Normally, after such occasions of theft, Steve will produce his cock at the breakfast bar or in the lounge and suggest, quite forcefully, that Carly suck it. Which she does, has to, really, because she robbed him.

This transaction lies at the heart of Carly and Steve's relationship and they both treat it with respect. Under normal circumstances, of course, a penis unleashed at a breakfast bar would possess only a slim chance of getting sucked. It would stride purposefully from its fly like a monarch on to a balcony, only to find that no subjects have turned up to applaud its arrival. After theft though, it's quite different. Carly knows this as much as Steve. People cheer and wave flags. Carly reverentially drops to her knees.

In the shower, Steve lets the water run over him. His hands follow the trendy contours of his body. His six-pack scrums with itself, his abdomen drops triangularly to what he feels must certainly be his deadly dick. But the breakfast bar, must justice really be found at the breakfast bar? A brightly lit blow job? Appliances humming gently in the background? What a well-lit and lonely fate. Steve shuts his eyes from the soap and sees the cardiganed girls of his
university past. Yes, his colleagues on his economics BA, the ponytailed frigids that had marvelled at his beauty and at the confident strides with which he entered the lecture theatre. Perhaps, thinks Steve, drying himself, I should have married one of them, seduced a little Mary or a little Jane, bought her fancy lingerie and had kids and discussed the misery and injustices of the open market, the merits of globalisation.

‘No,' he says to himself, rising like a dancer to meet his gaze in the mirror, the red towel falling off his blond hair.

‘No way,' he says again, shocked anew by the symmetry of his features. His haircut perched on his scalp like an endangered bird. No way, indeed. Because you die, he thinks, yeah, because you die and should never miss the chance to feel some real beauty. He leaves the bathroom and returns to the bedroom, picks up the condoms and flings them towards the bin. They go straight in. Good. Because you die.

An hour later, as Steve pulls his Audi TT out of the underground car park of his apartment block, the decision has been made. No more bullshit blow jobs at the breakfast bar. Anal, that's the ticket. All the rucksacked girls of his middle youth are gone, only Carly remains. Carly, whose knickers match her brain and whose bra matches her heart. Carly, it's impossible to imagine her heart as anything but tailored, designed with tomorrow's sex in mind. She has thighs that remind the normal boys of absolute joy. Perfectly curved. But anal, thinks Steve, rejecting distraction, anal's the ticket.

Steve pulls the car on to Upper Brook Street, heading south, past the instantly outdated flats built around the turn of the twentieth century. He feels perfectly entitled to play
the economy of sex. Sex is his way of solving things. Before now he might have spoken, turned a phrase or placed a kiss. But few turn phrases nowadays. Most bang away at another, eyes shut, just breathy hissing coming from their tightened lips. Carly robbed me, he thinks, anal will make me a man once more. Traffic lights go red, he checks his phone: no word from Carly. The lights go green.

He turns right off Upper Brook Street, down Moseley Road, through Fallowfield, then Withington, past the cancer hospital and its air of glassy, transparent dread, then further south to Didsbury. There is sunlight and the streets have been cleaned. Didsbury ‘Village', as it's curiously known, is dominated by franchise restaurants. Steve parks up then buys a copy of the
Financial Times
in a newsagent's. He exits the shop, the pink paper folded under his arm. A man walks by with cardboard coffee cups for hands. No, not that. Normality. A brunette jogs past in tight shorts and sports bra, her tongue visible like the tip of a violet lipstick. No, no, normality. Steve crosses the road.

He has travelled to Didsbury to meet Frank. Frank is a fat twat. He's sitting sipping a latte on the terrace of a franchise Italian. He has a papier-mâche head and a gut like an incoming tide. Frank is Steve's guru, an expert in investment and risk, the reason for Steve's burgeoning wealth. Frank spends his days relocating his money and watching his bank account swell. His nights are spent bantering with the prostitutes of Cheshire. Invariably, as the sun rises, Frank finds himself drunk, protruding like a human-shaped tumour out of the back of some high-quality call girl.