Life (8 page)

The beat came thrumming up through their feet. Anna leaned out over a rail, where people were dancing and drinking below. Spence embraced her from behind, burying his face and mouth in her warm nape, pulling her close. He was lost in kissing, pressing his aching genitals against her bottom, running his palms over her breasts, wonderfully tormented, expecting any moment she’d say stop, this is a public place, when he realized that her hands were busy too, down inside the waistband of her skirt. “Anna,” he whispered, scandalized, “are you by any chance playing with yourself?”

“Yes I am. Anything wrong with that?”

Holy Baloney. There were people
watching,
or at any moment might be. She didn’t care. She was reaching behind her, groping for his dick. Working as if he was defusing a bomb with seconds to spare he managed to unzip his pants one handed, positioned himself under her, eased her knickers aside from the cleft, and he was there: inside, he could hardly believe this, but he was going like a piston, Anna’s breath catching, and her whole body buckling. They fell to the floor, crawled behind a chunky sofa and went on fucking, while footsteps passed and voices chattered… Another of these nights, in one of the clubs they frequented in Bournemouth, they were dry-humping to the beat in the middle of the dance floor; it was common practice. She got her legs up around his waist, pushed the front of his jogging pants down under his balls, freed his rock hard penis and mounted it. Spence, no longer aghast, still fabulously excited by her boldness, was clutching her gloriously smooth butt, when he found that a strange hand had joined his own under her skirt. Two garish, sweat-dripping faces appeared on either side of Anna’s head. “Hey, d’you fancy a foursome?” yelled the girl. Spence was covered in confusion; Anna lifted her face and answered coolly, “sorry mates, this is a private party,” and at her words Spence instead of wilting came, explosively; it was incredible that they stayed upright. The experience cracked them both up. They had to go off and crouch in a corner, feeling more vulnerable when dissolved by laughter than in coitus.

He would wake in Regis Passage to the screaming of the herring gulls, the guttural roocoo, roocoo of the back garden wood pigeons, and the braying of the collared doves, the pigeons’ slender cousins, whose tender beige plumage belied their aggressive street-style. Did some drugs, did some of his ridiculously tedious but easy programming work, and went to find Anna, who would be roasting herself on the crowded beach. She and Daz were working in a smart little restaurant, alternately cooking and waitressing, lunch and evenings. The pay was abysmal, but the tips were good and the food was free. He would eat whatever they’d brought him and drink the wine they’d usually managed to sneak out. Eventually the girls would go back to work and he would hang with Frank, Alice Flynn, Ramone, and the various somewhat scary characters who occupied the rest of the squat. He would be waiting for Anna when she finished at the restaurant. She would have already changed her clothes; her hair would smell of cooking oil. They would go out dancing in this club or that club, anywhere that didn’t cost too much, they weren’t proud. Dancing, they were all over each other’s bodies. Spence thought of a shocking craze known as the waltz: which must have been like this, before it hit the drawing rooms. Skirts up and pants down, bodies whirling, locked in couple, rocking to that beat. If anyone knew of a party, they went on there when the clubs finally faded, and then back to Regis Passage and fucked some more at dawn (public and near-public fornication was the tip of the iceberg, they never stopped, it seemed to him, either fucking or thinking about fucking) before she left to get ready for work… Weekends were different, if Rob, who had a job in London, came down. Spence did not care for the trite double date that materialized. He discovered that he didn’t like Rob Fowler. Sometimes Daz went up to London instead, and that was good, though it made no difference to Anna’s hours. They hardly slept, they forgot to eat, they expended staggering amounts of energy, day and night. How ’a God’s name did they survive this regime? They were young.

In Frank’s kitchen, late at night, they sat and talked with Frank about the nature of reality. Spence was of the opinion that shit happens. Everyone’s having a different summer. There’s no meaning except what we construct, not ever, nohow.

Anna said, “meaning can come at you from the future.”

“D’you mind explaining that?”

“Well, say, we seem to be running out of water on this planet. If that’s true, and it’s not the only limit we seem to be hitting, then the old story is confirmed. We’re the crown of creation all right, we’re the end of the line. That’s a meaning.”

“But before then we escape, in our starships, flying mother nature’s silver seed—”

“Not on present figures,” said Anna darkly. “Anyway, leaving aside the heat death of the universe, what do you mean by
there’s no meaning except what we construct?
Since you can’t talk, or think, at all without constructing a meaning, what’s the content in that statement?”

Frank was entertained by their babbling: “Tell us what reductionism means, again,” he suggested. She got on with Frank. He
didn’t interrupt.

“Well, reductionism is when you explain things in terms of simple components. Could I have your Rubik’s cube?” Frank handed the toy down from its shelf. Anna swiveled the puzzle into chaos and then deftly returned it order. “See. The blocks of color are the units and I’ve reduced them to order. Now we say the puzzle’s solved, and we’re happy, but it’s just an interpretation. You could arrange the tiles, or any units of any system, into their maximum state of complexity. That would be order too.”

Frank was cooking a free-range omelet, for himself not for them. He never did anything for anybody else. That was the secret of a happy life, he said. Please yourself. He dribbled green virgin olive oil into one of his burnished skillets and watched Anna over his shoulder.

“Stand on yer head again. I like it when you stand on yer head.”

Anna crouched, dropped her rosy brown brow onto her cupped hands and rose, feet to the ceiling, neatly perpendicular: luckily her knickers were clean. The parrot squawked “AMAZING!”

“She’s full of surprises, your girlfriend,” said Frank approvingly.

“She’s full of drink and drugs. I’m going to have to take her to bed.”

Having Ramone in the squat had turned out better than Spence had expected, because she’d taken up with Frank. Mr Frank N Furter, though you wouldn’t think so to look at him, was quite the ladies’ man. He’d run through several girlfriends in the short time that Spence had known him, each of them startlingly pretty, hip, and well turned out. His liaison with Ramone was inexplicable, unless he saw her as another exotic animal for the collection. Ramone herself—Spence suspected—drew a blank on sexual choice. She was someone who would nurse deliberately hopeless passions, remaining indifferent to the way her actual body was passed around. Anyway, his host and the wild girl were an item, in an offhand, impersonal way: and Spence was grateful. Between her duties as Frank’s paramour, the novel she was writing, and the hours she spent closeted with Alice Flynn playing soulful ballads, she didn’t have much time to harass Spence. Though she had her moments. Once they were walking uptown in the middle of the afternoon, eating tomatoes they’d fetched from the allotment, when she stepped back against a shop window, dropped to her haunches, and fumbled blatantly under her skirts. A pungent stream of liquid came trickling across the hot, filthy sidewalk slabs. The passers-by paid no attention, but Spence was outraged.

“What’s the matter?” demanded Ramone, catching up and grinning at his distress. “I was only taking a piss. Is it my fault there are no public toilets? Men do that all the time.”

“I have never pissed in the street in my life,” snapped Spence. “I don’t know what right you have to inflict that exhibitionist stuff on me.”

She used to do it on campus, she’d said she was marking her territory, but at least she’d wait ’til after dark. She looked up at him malignly, more than ever like a cross between Gollum and Mr Toad when dressed as a washer-woman. She had taken to wearing contact lenses. Ramone’s eyes were an unusual shade of blue: opaque, greenish, like dark turquoise. Sounded good, but on her it made you think of river mud. “Yeah, but you do other things, you dirty dog. I tell you what, Spence, I’ll trade you. Your male duties for my womanly privileges. Anytime.”

She was so openly hostile towards his relationship with Anna that he wondered if the fake Sapphic story was a double blind. The constant soft ache of arousal in his groin made him speculate, was Anna that way inclined? Was he expected to do it with both of them? But the terms of the pact were clear, he was safe. Aside from her dirty habits, and ensuring he’d spend the next several years of his life plagued by phantom lines from Dusty Springfield lyrics, Ramone could do him no harm. She was even looking better, he noted. There was still a tang of body odor and unhygienic underwear in her vicinity, but the mass of hair was more artistically disheveled and the hippie clothing almost stylish, in an abandoned way. Frank was probably treating her better than any sexual partner she’d ever had. He was good to his pets. Spence, the American Tourist in the menagerie, ought to know.

At first he’d wondered how Anna had known that their bargain would turn out so well. Spence had had his reasons. What had made her so sure? He realized that she’d known nothing. She had identified the most likely of her male friends (her best male friend, he flattered himself) and taken a calculated risk, armed with no more than her noble nature and her faith in physiology. He feared for his beloved:
steel true, blade straight.
He sensed within her rigor such a fragile and vulnerable spirit. He wanted to protect her from the cruel world.

It was an extraordinary time. It had to end.

Anna liked dressing for him after work, in the staff toilet cubicle at the restaurant: the orange skirt with splashes of scarlet and a clinging white tee-shirt; the fringed green and gold sarong worn short to her thighs; her favorite, the lavender sundress. White cotton knickers, a bra that
fitted
without any repulsive underwire. Everything reminded her of his hands: the smell of his ejaculate always lingering on her body, despite the kitchen odors. Thoughts of things they had done together bathed her in delicious heat. She checked herself in the drizzled mirror, is this still Anna? She disliked the idea of
they all
saying to each other behind her back, look what sex has done for our prim scientist! But you can’t prevent that sort of thing. They say, let them say. She and Daz met Spence and they went to a bar, where they would meet maybe Wol and Rosey, who were living in a huge Victorian flat borrowed from a rock star, Simon Gough, Ramone, Flynn, some of the weirdos from Regis Passage. Then she
was Anna,
the quiet one, taking no active part in the conversation, unless she forgot herself and started explaining something until her victim glazed over; while he
was Spence,
with his charming American accent, deadpan witticisms, the smile with which he savored English turns of phrase, laughter that creased the corners of his grey eyes, and a sneaky detachment from that eternal male hierarchy. You couldn’t rank Spence; he wasn’t one of the chiefs, but he wasn’t one of the Indians either. She liked that.

Eventually these sophisticates would deign to proceed to a club, into a wash of sound, bodies, darkness, laser light. It was so good to dance. Faces beamed at them, brimming with chemically induced sweetness. It would be harsh to call the mood false, when the added chemicals couldn’t do anything if the brain’s own resources didn’t leap to greet them, like lovers meeting. God bless the drug. God bless the pressures and forces of all the billions of years that built us to be so capable of joy. She and Spence, however, preferred their own inner glow, afraid chemicals might flatten the libido. They would vanish into the anonymous crowd, groping each other insatiably.

Ramone was very angry about Anna’s fall from single grace. She maintained that sex with a man was feeble and contemptible. Lesbian love-making was incomparably more valuable and more profound. When Anna pointed out that Ramone was at present fucking a male and shamelessly patriarchal drug-dealer geezer at least twice her age, Ramone said: that’s different. I’m not doing Frank for fun. I’m collecting life experience. When Anna said why couldn’t Ramone find herself an educational dyke-geezer girlfriend, Ramone curled her chimpanzee lip.

“You don’t know how tough it is, being a feminist and a lesbian. Practically all the women on the scene put the same moves on you as if they were men. I’m not going to swallow their shit. Lesbianism could be brilliant. Unfortunately it’s a pathetic joke, a poor imitation of the male supremacist world like everything else women do.”