X44 (pt 1)

I was exhausted on the bus and drifting into a kind of fitful half sleep and a bald man was in the seat in front of my own, and in my delirious dream-like state I thought that my baby – who is also bald – was sitting on my lap, and I felt myself leaning forward to kiss her on the top of her bald head which was in fact the bald head of the bald man in the seat in front of my own, and fortunately I stopped myself from doing it before my lips made contact with his tufty skin and I would’ve had to explain just what exactly I was doing. I dreamed you were my baby. Such are the perils of parenting. If you hear racist youths on the bus should you tell them to shut it, as in “the fuck up”? There was some yod-dropping Norfolk bumpkin in tracksuit and grease saying how he’d seen a black boy “so black he was shiny”, and one of his friends told him he was racist and he said he wasn’t being racist, just describing him, and I turned and said in fact it and by extension he was racist, and he blushed and told me it was none of my business. It’s the quandary of tolerance– should one tolerate intolerance? Should one sit back while injustices unfurl around them? In London there was an oafish slob shouting at and eventually pushing at his female companion, both drunk apparently, but she was telling him to “get off me”, to “stop stop”, and being drunk myself I suggested he leave her alone as she clearly wasn’t enjoying it, and he punched me in the face for my trouble, and neither the few friends I was with (including the sister of an ex-girlfriend who I had been in love with for a half decade [the sister, not the ex-girlfriend; years later we would finally kiss – I mean we had before once or twice {once} but only ever in such a way as felt like the reluctant concessions made to a friend at the end of a rough week – with something akin to passion, outside of a pub in New Cross where we had drunk for a few hours in near silence, only pressing into each other with increasing desire as the time passed, her toes against my flanks, my head buried in her hair, curled together like serpents, pulling away between lengthy slurps to look at each other’s faces, and she urged me to go back to her place but for reasons that I cannot comprehend even now I refused, only kissed her some more times, and refused again, and left reeling and wired and hysterical with lust, and on the train home thought about what might have occurred as I have ever since, about her genitals bared in a dark street, about cunnilingus pressed up against university property with a leg over my shoulder, about my cock in her mouth, about fucking her, finally, while she writhes and mutters, and softening and oiling her tremendous little arsehole and going at it that way, gripped around me like a psychopathic aggressor, about the pair of us left clammy and expended on her soft mattress with the door to the garden wide open to the morning, I should have gone, should have, should. We hooked up a week or so later, a day in the park, the pub, intense frisson, uncontrollable erections, and when I left we kissed again, more calmly by then, tender as children, as though we had all the time in the world; we haven’t spoken since, the copulation left as a thing only of imagination]) nor any of the other many passengers on the bus came to my aid – though the female companion called me a gentleman as she alighted with her abuser. The easy thing is often the wrong thing and we must not be complicit in the wrongs of the world or else be the cause. Welcome aboard. The girl, vile girl, belched loudly in defiance of decency. Her face was a smudge of features, remnants of an ill-resolved cleft palate that had entrenched her with the very psychosocial problems of which the belching was no doubt symptomatic, wilfully abetting her obvious misfortunes with acts of digestive hostility. She was a mean-hearted bigot, a Norfolk soul, slurring muttered insults through her own speech impediment at passing pedestrians, the wonderful irony of the truly ugly sitting in the harshest judgement of the appearance of others. The belches shook like seismic events with every turn of the bus wheels, superseding language, any communication with her couple of grotesque friends reduced to bodily noises, emissions, grunts, farts, endless dreadful laughter. Was there no sense of silence, the under twenties deafening the sound of their own pointlessness with a barrage of biological commentary. They would fall asleep eventually, ten or so miles out of the city, shattered by the intake of oxygen from the spasm of their diaphragms. One fat driver closed the doors as the final passenger before changeover alighted in the city and a gathering crowd waited in a vicious breeze to be permitted access for the return journey. They relished the flaunting of such meagre authority, the drivers, idly watching the waiting watching until arbitrarily they deemed it time. He hunched over the steering wheel behind which his fat scarcely fit as though falling asleep or squinting upon a small font but soon was seen to hook a thick squat cock from his fly and then shepherd it to popping while the assembled watched aghast. The bus reeked of glans when they boarded, face as red as slapped hide, the exertion of pleasure almost too great. A mournfully pale teen wandered the commercial areas waiting for transport to the barren coastal town that heaves with spent opportunities and miscarried enterprise and in which he resides with his two parents who are themselves emblematic of such miscarriage. He had incredibly short arms, unusually so, as though suffering from a mild achondroplasia, despite his being of average height, his minor hands balled in fists in front of his immense fleshy pectorals that like meringue attain firm peaks visible beneath his attire, his feet equally inconsequential, perhaps an eight, perhaps less, such judgements can be difficult during motion. Little feet little soul and little ponce also. He bore the hallmarks of the fan of the metallic musical genres, adorned in clumsily applied eyeliner that appeared spooned on in darkness and greasy black locks scraped back into a stump of pony tail, a ghostly moustache smeared like food across his philtrum, a memory of a moustache, an allusion to the possibility of one, and on the rear of his black hoody was written in a large serif typeface “The streets were lined with a mixture of faeces and gore”, and I thought this a ridiculous and strange mantra to exhibit on the rear of one’s garment. Beside him was a tall fellow in ill-fitting black jeans streaked with mulch, a red flannel shirt, a pristine Marilyn Manson t-shirt, obviously new. They walked some feet apart but were evidently together, testing the costumes of nobodies and doing so very convincingly. She was cruel looking and sharp featured and sat only with her partner, a tall nonentity stuffed with teeth who in a child’s voice spoke of the motorcycle projects he undertook with his father and showed pictures of engines, fenders, various components that he kept on his phone. They seemed an unlikely coupling, she viciously gossiping about the transgressions of college associates and he thinking only of motorcycles, but appeared committed to one another in the way that the slim pickings of the rural townships that encircled the city instilled in their populace. On a late bus with a paucity of passengers, likely they’d been on the drink, their cheeks were flushed and they hummed of fruity ciders, she bade him finger her, down to the knuckle, with scant regard for privacy. The sloppy sound of his moving fingers, of the flesh of her cunt at work, were audible over the engine. As she approached orgasm she began to chirp like a songbird, a trill glissando from deep in back of her throat, an odour of flatus freed by the violence of her muscular contraction. He closed his eyes and pictured motorcycles cleaned and reassembled. “I’m skinny for my height.” Bird faced, thick hair, a non-entity. Most are until our twenties, even older. Clawing around for some key identifier that never comes. May I amount to more than the sum of my parts. “But even as a skinny guy I’m weak. Particularly. Only I can’t become stronger. No amount of effort will grant me the muscle of the better.” Cargo fashion slacks, elasticated waistband, two feet of pulled drawstring, pulled up above the navel. Didn’t know they existed outside of the end pages of the tabloids of middle England. The slack for the very thin and the very fat. Comfort and style, although not style. Comfort only. A slippery looking fiend creeps into the throng at the crowded bus stop, great pink lips like a couple of pink eels, grossly pallid, straight grey hair falling like coarse fronds about his huge ears, he presses up to the advertisement hoarding, elbows past the elderly and crippled, leather jacket in the cut and style of a blazer, desperate to board first despite the bus being empty, panicked, face a wash of reds and similar and greys and similar, spam a great plain of bulging veins, black boots that looked as though he’d sculpted them himself out of kids modelling clay, chomping at the bit for entry, squirming for it, why, cunt nabs the same seat every workday, but he’s crouching, crossing his legs like he’ll piss himself quickly. Please driver, grant entry. Cleave! Imagine his head cleaved open. I do. Cleave! Split down the middle like a prepped nut. CLEAVE! On comes Nanny Red – must be 60 if she’s a day. Always puts a smile on your face. It will be a fitting epitaph, when the time comes. A career whore. Best hand job in the eastern counties. Can work her palm across the top of the tip like poured custard. Knocks your legs out. She doesn’t fuck anymore, doesn’t need to; she was always a shrewd businessperson, paid into her own pension, retired from the more demanding acts by 45, but in her heyday she was mythic across the towns for her indiscriminate approach to the construction of utter pleasure, worked her tricks like marionettes, carefully aligned with their place in her narrative. They would count out their currency with trembling fingers and ponder how life could be the same after such enormity of feeling. She was a big fat bastard now but still turned cocks to rock, still forged fearsome desire like a skilled smith, and she still did the odd fast-five, for the art more than the pennies – the market had changed considerably since the days of (her) empire, lucky to scrape a tenner for an old-fashioned these days, less in the sticks; the ubiquity of porn had made the humble okie-dokie a precursor, at best, to something bigger, certainly not the grand finale; the lads of today wanted the endpumps of their hasty denouement to be rectally sleeved, the shoot-out facially deposited, or else cream-pied and foaming and Instagram fresh, so were the tropes we were fed by the erotic custodians of millennial lust. So fickle, the tastes of the flesh, ever in thrall to trend. There’s a pair of genuine anomalies, birthed as adults from the foul Norfolk quag, loud, thick, near toothless, the coarse thorny chin of lefternmost, the face sunk in on itself, imploding into its own catastrophe, nylon, muck, tapered ankles, corrective footwear, Velcro fastening, beige undergarments, genuine confusion, caged beasts turned free after decades, blinded by the patina of reality. Beneath a woollen bonnet – in June! – he blew raspberries, presumably unconsciously, with every exhalation, certainly a strange tic, but did not during conversation, if it could be considered as such. “Smartphone?” “Yepyep”. “You understand it? Understand how it work?” “Off outten Great Yarmouth amorrow.” “Oh yepyep.” “Gettern dustpan’n’brush’ll fer me sister.” “It’s’n day out hintut.” “Day out.” “That be the Thai place.” “You like Thai boyo?” “That I do.” “What’ll it be? Pasta spaghetti?” “Noo yer fucken mawkin, it be different items.” “My heart, life be a rum ole job life be.” “Do he do as he do do.” “Backards en forrards.” “Fare y’well’n.” The gaps punctured by the blown raspberries that went unmentioned by the other passengers, too cowardly to draw focus towards such obvious deficits. The civic operatives had constructed a portal for the eels at New Mills Yard, allowing passage for the slimy bastards past the torrential sluice and its gathered bobbing detritus, part of a misjudged river regeneration project to return the once navigable, now shit river to the centre of the city – floating businesses, outdoor bathing, formalised walking routes. They’d have to clean up the johnnies and syringes first, pressure wash the goose shit. Reassemble lost faith. All of it. They’ll not have mine. “Dauntless Rubberline,” fuckin ha ha, “this is for you.” Fuckem. I’ve a note or three about me, perchance I could sling one to Nanny Red, have her slop me out while I wreak squalor and agony amongst the commuters. Such scant hope for society when even the educated classes of which I am one choose depravity. A simpering young mother tiptoeing on razor heels dropped her baby, poor ruddy dolly flipped in its car seat off the back of a travel system it hadn’t been properly affixed to, hit the pavement with a thump that turned my guts, left hanging in darkness beneath the upturned seat; she bent for it, the mother, gripped to her champagne Huawei, trembling with that dreadful realisation of what might be, but the kid was okay, sobbing, blonde, floppy, incredibly red, but apparently not unusually so, and she said to a passing enquirer “why do they test us like this?”, and inevitably I imagined death and thought that if there was a test of competency set by the infants to entrap their inept guardians, which there wasn’t, then – if there was – she had failed it admirably. She’s left me/without a word/and her/the other/they’ve all of them gone.