friends are for

He waited listening to quiet music in his rented room, daubed in the dreadful and dull electric light that was filtered by the patient grey late winter afternoon into almost nothing. The curtains were patterned yellow and brown and open wide, and outside the struggling half-dark swallowed the house and the surrounding houses like a vast mouth, its muscles tightening and working in rhythmic contractions to better digest the world in its supreme silence. A man sat as still as dead in the open back door in the house behind in an uncomfortable looking chair, as an older female attempted to dig at concrete with a metal shovel. It was his friend’s birthday, a mid-20s insignificance tainted by the months-long breakdown of his longish relationship with a short attractive much younger girl whose flowing skirts and Indian accessories concealed a remarkable body and thickly hirsute genitals that drunk, some six month earlier at a garden party in the dark, she had wordlessly displayed without underwear, the pertinent lines and the hair still visible in the light from the patio doors, uncrossing her legs on the damp leather seat before him, her ankle length skirt rising with the parting of her knees like fields of towering corn run through jubilant, ecstatic, and slowly blinking her huge dark eyes as though in threat or assurance, though what he didn’t know, a split second of intense stolen eroticism that would live with him forever, the careless sound of his friend’s voice echoing through open windows; she closed her legs with grace and comfort in a motion that felt somehow complete and drank her drink back and placed a consoling hand gently on his shoulder and left him alone.

For several weeks he had feasted on Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love era look and to a lesser extent material, her eyes similarly huge and desperately captive in the way that his friend’s girlfriend couldn’t help but remind him of. He had found a photograph online which he had printed out in the college library and taped to his bedroom wall like an orthodox icon centuries old with her long Rublev fingers mirroring the same – to see Bush beneath motorcycle leathers was so at odds with his very perception of all popular music and what it stood for and could mean that the photograph was itself in but one image a paradigm crumbling into monochrome eternity of its own preservation – and stared for many hours at its grace; she stood by a river at a working dock and watched the water move and like an angel saw in that movement all of time. He felt the mercy in her voice when she sang, he let me take him in my hands, thought I bet!, felt it in his loins. He imagined the repugnant smugness of Del Palmer, Del’s Big Bass (he tried, always would, to cleanse his mind of the charred image of a second photograph burnt like a radiation blast, this time of the surprisingly-cleavaged [her breasts unconsidered, somehow too human] and carnally squatting –the way it would be! – Bush gripping the fret board of a bass guitar made immense by perspective alone like a conquering erection, Del’s own turgid coarse pocked fret, an odd picture in Bush’s record, overtly sexualised as opposed to sensualised, that grounded Bush in the earthly essence of her own genitals which, while alluring, remained a photo best forgotten, as Bush functioned on a level distinct from the brute fact of reproductive urges. Could she even play bass? Almost certainly, and Del a willing guide and chosen), counting his blessings day-by-day as he played bass and handclaps during office hours in the young Bush’s home studio, belittled by her meticulous demands and expectations, by her expressive dismay at the limits of his musical abilities; then later, undercover of laces and silks and an excellent moon she had privately performed into existence, fucking her by night as her parents sipped from decent tea cups in the room next door and thanked Christ for their incredible spawn, her transcendent dancer’s body wildly accommodating in its versatility of each of Palmer’s more unorthodox passions. The girl’s wilful esoterica would bring Bush to mind also, and her eyes throbbed as pools of mercury or great lakes in the stuttering LCD display of his stereo system.

Their relationship, hers and his friends, had been demolished by the ferocity of time, their love turning easily – unconsciously – to hate as it often does, and though they persisted in habit alone it was truly over, they needed only to speak its end into being; even a sound would do it. His friend felt swamped in his own joylessness, his girlfriend stifled by it. It was a disastrous foundation for longevity. Despite this she had attempted to make his birthday a special one, had planned breakfasts and a dinner and trips to places of interest or mutually memorable sites, one final effort, but he had crept from their bed very early and left the house, and when she awoke herself, shrouded in their musty sheets, and acknowledged his absence she angrily threw the breakfast things into the bin unopened and dressed and left also for no one knew where, the front door rattling behind her as she did. Some hours later but still early when his friend returned he took him to the pub and they bought two drinks a piece and sunk them fast, then a couple more which they savoured amidst blue cigarette smoke coiled as tormented serpents in the weak sun with crisp grease on their fingers like disfigurement. They spoke little but he had urged his friend to try, for his birthday at least, to try to enjoy himself and appreciate the trouble she had gone to. Met with the silence of even the muted slot machine they could hear the bubbles move in their drinks, the barmaid’s rustling tabloid, the burning ends of their unsmoked cigarettes, the microscopic life happening within the fibres of the odious pub carpet. His friend said that it was because it was his birthday that he couldn’t, and then thanked him for the drinks and said it was always the best part of his birthday, their drinks, and fastened his coat and walked into the street and in the opposite direction of the house. He watched through the window until he was out of sight and went home himself.

He passed their bedroom as he walked through the hall and saw her in there. She looked as though she had been crying but he shrugged apologetically when she looked at him, suddenly conscious of the bitter smell of drink on his breath, and climbed the stairs to his bedroom and sat on the edge of his bed and smoked and listened to quiet music as he himself was quiet then. Maybe five minutes later or maybe longer she knocked at his door in two dull knocks and he pulled it open and she came in and sat down on the floor and he did likewise and almost immediately she wept, an act he found unbearably sexy in its terminal humanity. He put his arm around her and already saw the future and had only to wait for it to unfold. He listened to her talk about her loss, and nodded at the correct moments, and narrowed his eyes when the gesture was appropriate, and muttered condolences and consolations at certain intervals, and he held one of her hands in both of his, and rested hands upon her forearms, thighs, calves. Her eyes were enormous and heavy with the tears that had by then stopped falling but persisted waiting nonetheless. He assured her that she was a good and tender person, too good and tender for his friend. He balanced wit and self-deprecation methodically, and she laughed and was very pretty when she did so. He said she was among the most attractive girls he had ever met, told her that if it wasn’t for respect for his friend he would be pleased to kiss at that very moment and furthermore would mean it forcefully. She told him he was the kind of man she imagined she would be with but it was the moment speaking only and the sentence felt clunky and unconsidered, false even, they felt it both but continued on the path they had begun to tread regardless, their coupling made inevitable by tedium and an acutely focused need for the kind of closeness that it and only it could provide. Their faces were inches apart and their breaths merged and they kissed, the music quiet, the electric light dreadful and dull. By necessity it was violent and determined and hurried for without momentum sustained it would have spluttered dead like a dropped match, and they both listened for the sound of the front door as like animals they clawed each other’s clothes off or just enough to do what they needed. The promise of his friend’s return, his birthday, the drinks, their adultery – was it adultery against a fossilized relationship? – aroused them both into action. She lay down and raised her buttocks up off the carpet and he with one hand pulled her pants off and threw them balled into a corner and with the other fumbled with his own belt and jeans. He knelt above her and pulled down her top and the cups of her bra and gazed at her breasts for some long seconds as though it were a vital spiritual mission but didn’t touch them, just felt the world at his fingertips momentarily. He carefully ran his hand from her knee up her thigh and then his fingers up the length of her cunt which he felt was wet and inviting and much as he remembered or imagined remembering, and he leaned over and they kissed more and he eased himself into her and then with long complete thrusts they fucked very efficiently like old hands and both tried to stifle their noises and largely succeeded, their faces reddening up, their eyes almost touching yet somehow very far away, the floorboards creaking terribly beneath the weight of their moving bodies. It would always end quickly, their warm flesh damp and sticky and unpleasant, his hand at rest beneath the buttock he had lifted as they fucked. Her guilt was instantaneous and all-encompassing and she shuffled him off of her and still lying down pulled her top back up. How frail those rare moments of clarity, how vulnerable. The weakness of simple pleasure. Chaos again reigns like starving hounds lapping. The disgust on her face was so physical it made him afraid. She would not cry for this. She stood and let her skirt fall and left the room without a word or a glance.

Later he would see her and his friend emerge from their bedroom bedraggled and ruffled and cheeks aflame in the aftermath of a sexual encounter, a reconstructive attempt, their eyes meeting only momentarily over the distance of the hallway then engulfed in the false laughter and aborted hopes of the happening present. The relationship ended only months later with their secret unspoken, the feel of her cunt as he comforted his friend still fresh in his memory.