Brass Read online

  I’m just not in the mood for all this though, right now. Cannot even be arsed putting a face on for lil’ Millie. I need to put things right with Anne Marie. The longer I stays out, the more time she’ll have to stew and she’s dangerous that one when she’s been left brooding. Once she’s made her mind up about somet, that’s it. She’d rather fuck you off then back down, she would. And she’s coming up to the rag la – fucken dementia, that is, at the best of times. What! Every cunt is out to get her! I become some depraved pervert who’s shagging everyone from her best mate to my nieces. Throws all sorts at us, she does. And she rants. Fuck, does she rant la! Starts off in this low kind of half mumbling that drones on and on for hours, slowly feeding into this big mad tantrum where she tears the fucken house apart! Fair do’s like, she always apologises in the aftermath. Pure ridden with guilt she is. And fuck does she more than make up to us in the bedroom if you know what I’m saying. Can hardly keep her hands off us round that time of the month. And I s’pose I’m half used to it now, end of the day – her rag. I’ve built up a resilience. Whatever she says floats in one ear and dribbles out the other. And if I’m being honest, it does half sort of tickle us, in fairness. Even when she’s on one, she’s adorable as fuck. But I could fucken punch myself for lying about tonight. There was no need, neither. I told her I was having a lad’s night in. That I was going to the bommie with the posse then back to Sean’s for a bevvy. It’s not like she would’ve minded if I’d’ve told her I was going into town neither, but I felt a bit of a cunt about it. She’s been on at us for ages to take her out to that new bar that’s opened on the Docks – The Pan. Says she’s got a wardrobe full of classy clobber that’s starting to collect cobwebs. I’ve tried to hint as subtly as possible that we shouldn’t really be spunking our money on one-off indulgences. That we should be saving up for the wedding and the house and that. So you can see what a fucken hyprocite I must’ve looked back then.

  The worst of it all, is the Millie thing though. Bad one la. Fucken bad one, that. Her seeing me in my gladrags when she’s stuck indoors is bad enough, but knowing Millie’s on board… How the fuck do I get round that one? And she does have to choose tonight to suddenly start taking an interest in her appearance don’t she? She’s pure eye candy to begin with lil’ Millie, but she’s always been a jeans and no make-up type of girl. Nails bitten to stumps and soap-scorched hair that’s never seen a brush. Christ la! You should’ve seen some of the knots I’ve cut from her hair! Fucken cig butts and all sorts in there. But recently, she’s started making an effort and that. Just subtle things mind you. Clothes that hug her rather than hang from her. A lick of make-up here and there. Scent. Going to the hairdressers instead of her usual DIY job. None of which makes it easier on the Missus, end of the day. I s’pose if lil’ Millie were nothing to look at then maybe Anne Marie could half handle it. My bezzie mate being a girl and that. But it is what it is, end of. Millie’s been there, in the house, looking how she does and I’ve just fucked off with her. Bad one, la. I’m a soft cunt, I am. I’m a fucken knobhead.

  Millie

  Town is barren for a Thursday night, and we flit from bar to bar, often just poking our head around the door for any sign of vim. We finally settle at Revolution, a vodka bar on Matthew Street – a guaranteed full house. It is as well. It’s fucking rammed with students, ostentatiously sinking slammers. Their presence puts a lump in my throat. Gets me thinking about Dad and that gangly, simpering girl. What on earth could he see in her? She’s hardly his type. Dad’s always gone in for elegance and restrained beauty – gypsy waifs. Andrea Corr, Catherine Zeta, Penelope Cruz.

  Mum.

  The rest of the crowd is comprised of single lads on the pull, and a few middle-aged tarts acting as reserves for a raucous hoard of schoolies. The sight of these brassy past-its, competing for attention puts a smile back on my face. Love it!

  Nearly all of the schoolies are wearing micro skirts with boots, tiny fuck-me tops and layer upon layer of make-up but you can tell by their eyes that their sexual biographies would barely fill a sheet of A4. Most of them are still virgins and the ones that have ventured past tit and tongue have probably been driven by all the wrong reasons – popularising themselves, keeping a boyfriend, impressing their peers or most likely of all, sheer misplaced curiosity. I doubt any of them have fucked for the sheer love of it. That’s the whole tragedy of growing up. It’s the one period in your life where there’s so much pleasure up for grabs and no one’s going to give you too hard a time for reaching out and seizing it. It’s the one period in your life when you can behave like an absolute slut – and get away with it. But most teenage girls tear through adolescence oblivious to the epicurean world they inhabit. Their potency only reveals itself in the frustrated haze of hindsight.

  Jamie and Sean pretty much shaped my understanding of sex. He’s a funny one, Jamie – he’s had his fair share of one night stands, but he seemed to accept them with a silent sorrow. He subscribed to an ideal which held love as a precondition for sex and he once told me that even if that love was ephemeral, even if it lasted all of five seconds, it had to be there in the beginning. If there was love, any sexual pursuit no matter how selfish or dangerous it was, could be justified. As a result he misspent a lot of his youth trying to negotiate between what felt good and what he thought was right. Sean was the polar opposite. He saw sex in its crudest terms – as something detached from any kind of emotion or meaning other than the physical. For him, sex was fucking – it was getting one’s hole and getting as much of it as possible. He was ruthless, almost barbaric in his pursuit of women, especially those lacking in sexual experience. He slept his way through South Liverpool, leaving in his wake a bereft trail of ruptured hearts and hymens.

  From Jamie I learnt that sex was as much concerned with psychology as it was with physiology. It was as much about the courting of anatomy as it was the meeting of two hearts, two minds. I also learnt that it was better to have done something and have regretted it, than to have not done it and spend your days wishing you had. Jamie spent a lot of his days reading books about things he wished he’d done.

  From Sean I learnt that girls were divided into the bipolar categories of sluts and ‘girlfriend material’ and if I wanted to satisfy my voracious young libido than I had to act post haste. According to Sean you could be as promiscuous as you liked as long as you were under fifteen. You’d risk a reputation of being ‘easy’, but as long as you stitched up your knickers from sixteen onwards you could still qualify as girlfriend material. Girls who hit seventeen and were still doing the rounds would inevitably be branded sluts, and once past eighteen it was virtually impossible to transcend this stigma. If you were clever, however, you could bypass this labelling system through careful management of your sexual geography. A girl who fucked a hundred boys, a different one in every town could evade the moral flagellation reserved for girls who slept with more than one boy from the same school. As childish and dogmatic as Sean’s suppositions were, there was a simple logic behind them, and they pretty much dictated my early sexual experiences.

  My first sexual encounter was with a thirty-seven-year-old man. Philip. I was fourteen. I chose him because he was married. Because he had a nice car and wore a blue hooded Adidas top. Because he looked unhappy. Because he lived at the bottom of our road but most of all because he was Dad’s mate. I knew it would go no further. No one would ever find out. I could almost cheat losing my virginity. My name couldn’t be added to the long list of slags that covered five and a half doors of the boys’ toilets. I also assumed he’d be in awe of my supple, young body. His wife was a casualty of marriage – fat and dowdy and consumed by motherhood – and I just took it that Philip would be, well, grateful. If he was though, he never showed it. He broke down in tears within moments of stealing my virginity and then ignored my calls and threatened to tell Dad when I turned up outside his works one evening. And then he avoided me forever. He moved to Manchester and I never heard or saw anything of h
im again except on my seventeenth birthday he sent me his blue hooded jumper through the post. No card, no note – just a jumper that smelt of blokey aftershave. It’s folded in a box at the back of my wardrobe along with the pair of silk gloves that Mum wore on her wedding day and I afford it far more sentiment then it deserves.

  After Philip, I had a couple of relationships with lads my own age. Both were fleeting, prosaic encounters. The first was with a guy called Joey. We met in the State. He was dancing, bare chested, on top of a speaker. I handed him a bottle of water and he pulled me up to dance and slipped me a California Sunrise.

  It was one of the best ecstasy nights of my life.

  I could tell by the way he moved that he’d be a good fuck. He was fantastic, one of my best shags ever but he was also of limited intelligence. I was too ashamed to let him meet Mum and Dad, and after a week, I felt I’d learned everything there was to know about him. I took the dastardly route of finishing with him in writing. The other lad, Robert, I met at O’Malleys. Now, he was intelligent. Decent too. I flaunted him to my parents and I allowed him to meet me at the school gates. He treated me like a lady – spoiled me, adored me. He drove me to Cornwall just to see a full moon. He gave me money to buy my folks presents at Christmas and he wore rubbers cos he said the pill was bad for me. But he lacked Joey’s sexual magnetism. He was careful and considerate and he frustrated me and I hated him for it. No matter how hard I hinted, he would never just fuck me. He saw my hankering for brutal, unrefined sex as something that needed to be corrected not satiated, and at fifteen I saw that as an unpardonable flaw. Sometimes, I called round at Joey’s little flat and let him fuck me – and then I fucked them both off.

  And then there were the girls. Which just kind of happened. There was no tumultuous path of self-discovery that preceded it, no traumatic decision or sacrifice, no introspective showdown. It was nothing like that. It just happened. It just happened the night that Mum left, the night I fled to the Keeley’s – but the timing has no significance, nil, none at all. It simply happens to be the night I stumbled across two girls going down on each other in a porno mag. Of course sexologists would argue that there must always have been some latent biological yearning waiting to be triggered and the pornography served as a catalyst. That may well be the case, but all I know is that up until I pulled that magazine from under Jamie’s bed, right up until I hit page twenty, I had no predilections for women of any kind, ever. Who knows, If I’d never set eyes upon Lara and Dawn I may have skimmed over such a moment of realisation and evolved into a healthy uncomplicated heterosexual. Maybe I’d be curled up in bed now with some young Paul Newman lookalike, supping cocoa, sharing a spliff. Planning languorous weekends away.

  That morning, after Jamie and Billy had left for work, I did what I’d never done and went rummaging in their room. I found a box underneath Jamie’s bed and my world burst wide open. Dismissively, more amused than titillated by its content, I sifted through a copy of Club International. There was some tart on the front with humongous breasts bursting out of a children’s size footie shirt. The expression on her face said, use me. I locked the door and turned the page. The first few pictures made me giggle. There was a ginger motherly type with a bald fanny lying spread eagled on a kitchen floor – a big idiotic grin splashed across her face, a Chinese girl clad in Caterpillar boots and a cowboy hat, and then page after page of skinny airbrushed models pulling stupid faces. A spur of disappointment stretched inside me then faded quickly, leaving within me the dull throb of relief. My voyage into the arcane alter ego of men’s sexuality amounted to a few burlesque women with average faces, advertising their accessibility as though their lives depended on it. That was it? Pornography? The boys club that had dared to exclude me. And that was what it amounted to? Those were the girls I had both revered and feared? I laughed out loud and flicked over a few pages, stumped as to what pleasure Jamie might derive from all this.

  And then I met Lara and Dawn. And everything changed.

  Dawn was svelte with the feline eyes, severe cheekbones and stony constitution of an East European hooker. Lara was flame haired and pale, made cheeky by an unruly army of freckles dusting her button nose. Her breasts were young and firm but the nipples had the rough and rampant protrusion that only greedy babies can bring. She was an eighteen-year-old fashion student from Hull ‘… who arranged lesbian orgies with her pals and with the right girls would do anything…’

  If Dawn put a gun to my cunt, then Lara pulled the trigger.

  There was a whole six pages devoted to them getting it on with each other in a living room which could have only belonged to a student. I masturbated right there on the floor and when I came it felt like all the muscles in my cunt had collapsed.

  I split the rest of my stay between brooding and masturbating and by the time I moved back home, I was having difficulty pissing. My clit was so numb and spent that I thought it was damaged for good. I shaved my cunt, just like Lara’s, so my thick glossy mane became a faint strip of central reservation, splitting my cunt perfectly into two naked halves and I fantasised constantly about meeting her. I even considered touring the canteens of the various fashion colleges of Hull. Soon, I became so consumed by the idea of sex with a woman that I could no longer padlock my fantasies to the realm of masturbatory expression and they seeped into my day to day existence. I suddenly saw women through the eyes of a pornographer. My school mates, my English teacher and the check out girls at Tesco’s suddenly became candidates for Escort, Men Only, Mayfair and my favourite of all – Club Magazine. And all female activity, no matter how innocuous its intention became loaded with sexual connotations. A smile, a look, the way a girl wore her hair. Poise. They were all signals, conscious or unconscious, expressing sexual objectives. You could determine the Marys from the Magdalenas just by the way a girl wore her school uniform. Naked legs in the middle of winter; conspicuous lacy bras under see-through shirts, scuds of makeup and Lambert and Butler-hued fingers clad in junior Sovereign rings – they were the ones guaranteed to deliver. They were the ones who’d do anything. I reduced girls to bodies or bits of. I saw them in terms of tits, legs and arse. I undressed every girl that I met, bending them like plasticine – this way and that way into every possible position. No one escaped appraisal or categorisation.

  I never saw myself as an object though. I neither identified with the women I objectified or the men that objectified them. I saw myself as something entirely different, as some sex-crazed genderless freak.

  My love affair with wank mags and lap dancing bars lasted all of twelve months, and I’m glad in a way that it’s over now. In hindsight I can see what a distorted view of the world it lent me. I don’t buy into all that received feminist wisdom that holds porn responsible for every ill perpetrated on women by men, but there’s no doubt that pornography impinged on my sense of reality. Implicit in its appeal is the idea that all girls are gagging for it, that they crave to be treated like filthy indefatigable whores as much as they crave to be pampered like princesses. That glamour models and lap dancers – they do what they do for the love of it. Not for the money. They crave sex. I truly believed that for twelve months. And when I discovered otherwise, the realisation crushed me.

  I take Jamie’s hand and weave us through to the bar. It’s hot in here. I wriggle out of my coat and sling it over Jamie’s shoulder then lean into the bar, jutting my chest out and flaring my lips in a way that is aloof but not entirely unapproachable. Within seconds I’m being served. A young girl with a heart-shaped face and a florid complexion. No tits. Literally, two gnat bites straining for recognition against a white Lycra vest. I am drawn to them in the same perverse way I am drawn to the disfigured faces of burns victims and I find it impossible to stop my eyes sliding off her chin. I can’t stop myself. What do they look like – really look like? How would I respond to her naked body if I’d picked her up on the street and taken her back to a hotel room. Would I be repulsed or aroused? Would I make her leave her top on, or
would I exploit her deformity? Shave her cunt and reinvent her as my hockey girl? But even through the deceitful lens of an alcohol swoon, I could never fancy her – not if she was the filthiest girl in the world. The skin around her eyes and lips have frayed a decade too early and her hips are too wide to evoke any type of schoolgirl fantasy. She just looks like a very average nineteen-year-old who’s tits have skipped puberty. Fucked. I order three vodka slammers and offer her a consoling smile. She responds with a blank face so I fold my arms, squeeze my tits into an impressive cleavage and accept the drinks with a hostile eyebrow. I pass one of the glasses back to Jamie and he asks me why I’ve only bought three. I tell him that Kev and Mally can buy their own drinks. They haven’t so much as dipped in their pockets all night. I know they’re both hard up but if they’ve got no money they shouldn’t be out – end of story. Saint Jamie is having none of it, of course. He slips past me and squeezes in at the bar. It’s too noisy and crowded to expostulate, so in a gesture of silent protestation I down both the drinks in my possession, slam the empty glasses on the bar and then snatch the other from his hand and hurl it into the pits of my throat.

  It takes a few seconds to hit me and then suddenly all at once I’m reeling from the surge and rock of a violent dry-retch fit. I can hardly get my breath. My guts are vaulting horribly. I lift my hand to my mouth to stop myself puking and concentrate hard on breathing, in-out, in-out. This is vicious. This hurts.

  A skinny, wide-eyed thing with violent cheekbones flashes me a sympathetic look. I tear myself away from her tits and succumb to a querulous belch that scalds acid and vodka all the way up my nose. My stomach lurches into spasm, jerking me forward and my hand vaults up to my mouth again.