6

buttocks, now that you’ve achieved lodgement between them, angling them this way and that to persuade yourself of the pleasure you must be feeling.

And he? What are his sensations? His large hard cock must be throbbing against the lifeless stone, as the gradual surrender of his anus feels more and more like a sharp steel knife swallowed up by quicksand, or like a backed-up case of constipation. Sharp, painful, unclean, fascinating. He’s jerking about more, now, as if losing control of the process, the procès: the trial.

«Attends, dit Mony, reste assis.» Yes, stay still, little one.

Et, se couchant sur la mourante, il fit entrer son vit bandant dans le con moribond. You cannot help but visualise Estelle lying on her back, with the subhuman assassin Cornabœuf straddled across her shit-stained face. Prince Mony thus placed himself between her thighs to enter the dying pussy. … Il jouit ainsi des derniers spasmes de l’assassinée, dont les dernières douleurs durent être affreuses, et il trempa ses bras dans le sang chaud qui jaillissait du ventre. “He thus enjoyed the victim’s last spasms, which must have been horridly painful, and bathed his arms in the hot blood which spilled from her stomach.” You are bent over your victim, victim more of economics than of your insignificant lust, as your cock begins to spasm. The frustration of the double membrane – living and manufactured – is compounded as you retreat, frustrated at the lack of fleshly contact. The condom receives your seed, nevertheless, along with his mingled blood and shit.

Quand il eut déchargé, l’actrice ne remuait plus. Elle était raide et ses yeux révulsés étaient pleins de merde. “When he had discharged, the actress was no longer moving.” A prostitute, no matter how amateurish, must be a kind of actor, must feign enough humanity to promote the customer’s arousal. A boy who bends over to get money may have no interest in the act, but he knows that his masculinity is at the very least called into question by it. You disengage yourself quite quickly from him, half-expecting an elbow in the face or a gob of spit. What he does takes you therefore quite by surprise. “She was stiff and stark, and her revolted eyes were full of filth.” His eyes are bright and alive. He seizes you by the back of the neck (jeans halfway down, limp-dangling cock still cocooned in its ridiculous plastic cover, business shirt rucked up and clinging sweatily to your back) and kisses you hard on the open mouth, his tongue squirming deep inside, bad teeth forgotten.

You are Estelle, his willing bitch, at that moment, albeit fresh from mastering his arse (though could you ever, from the first, think that was what you were doing?) When he releases you, defiant and upright in his grey sweats,

7

It is very dark, and he is surrounded by ghostly shapes. A body floats by, and he clutches at it before seeing the huge gaping wound in the back of the young sailor’s head. He recoils, then pulls at the light-switch on his jacket, but nothing happens.

He is now muttering under his breath: “Got to keep moving. What’s that over there? Bugger me. Better go and see.” He does not seem to be conscious of what he is saying, which is getting more and more disjointed. At times he appears to imagine he is speaking to Ellen. “Ellie, we got to get rid of that cat,” he says. “That’s the third time the little shit’s tripped me coming in the door.”

There is a light swell, but little wind. As he swims on through the darkness, he sees that the largest nearby object is in fact a lifeboat. It is extremely low in the water, half-swamped, but there are still a few people sitting in it. Others are clinging to the ropes and trailing ends of canvas around the sides. Their faces bear an indescribable look of apathy, mixed with dawning shock.

• Scene [Bailing out the boat (Friday 6/11, c. 1.30 a.m.)]

With no help from those on board, Angus flops across the almost submerged gunwale.

“Some of you have got to get out so we can bail her dry,” he says. Nobody moves. “Come on, you’ve got to,” he repeats, more coaxingly.


Insert: [Dark night. Angus is on the far side of a pane of glass, with frost streaking the edges. “Ellie, please,” he is saying. “Let me in. You’ve got to. It’s bloody freezing out here.” His face continues to stare in, registering little hope, but an immense resignation. Is there movement from our side of the window?]


One of the older women says “Come on, children,” and begins to climb clumsily over the side of the boat, assisted by her eldest daughter, and followed by her other two children. The others reluctantly imitate her, including (latterly) the men.

Angus stops one young woman with two babies, and says, “No, that’s enough.” He would clearly like to do something more for the cold and shivering girl, but has to content himself with patting one of the babies on the head. “Good girl, good girl,” he croons. The baby begins to cry.

8

complicated pockets and harness. She had not troubled to put on her boots, so her bare feet poked out somewhat incongruously from the heavy, stained folds.

“Here I am,” he said, feeling the occasion demanded some comment. For some reason, this seemed to amuse her greatly.

“Here you are! But who’re you, and what are we supposed to do with you?”

It was only a token protest at this stage, though, as she ushered him through the door into a little apartment behind. As prescribed, the first thing he did on the threshold was to stop and quickly pan around the room, recording its contents.
Misreading, again, his reactions, the girl pushed him half-playfully from behind: “Go on in. She won’t bite!”

She was referring, he inferred, to the presence of another young woman in the room in front of him. This one was wearing a blue terry-cloth dressing-gown, and was far more feminine in appearance than the spiky young uniform behind him. She had long black hair, which she had evidently just been washing, for she was dabbing at it with a rather ratty-looking towel, and looked distinctly put out to see him.

“Excuse … intrusion.” He managed to come up with the second word eventually, although it was a struggle to remember it. They had warned him of the possibility of some such partial aphasia in the secondary speech areas, but he had not since then had his abilities so tested as in this particular encounter.

As he walked into the room, he found himself regarding the new young woman with immense interest and curiosity. She too had her feet bare, and he concluded that there were no irregularities in the steel floor to damage them. Her toenails, he was interested to observe, were painted purple, though the finger nails were regulation length.

“My God, where did they find you!” the new young woman (he found himself mentally classifying them as long-hair and short-hair) exclaimed incredulously.

Short-hair had now come in, closing the door behind her, and stood observing the scene with malicious pleasure.

“Julie, I’d like to present to you our guest, Mister Orders Given, from Outside. His hobbies are ringing bells, running up stairs to impress people who couldn’t give a fuck, and hanging around in doorways …”

He waited a little to see if there was any more, but her fund of invention seemed to have dried up, and said: “Lieutenant.”

9

Primus-Pricker

We decided to camp for the night. Some hours later I woke up to hear a blizzard blowing outside, and to find Filippo fumbling amongst some gear at the head-end of the tent. From inside my bag I called out to inquire if there was anything wrong, and received a reply that he was looking for the primus-pricker. Then he slipped back into his sleeping-bag, and all became quiet, except for the snow beating against the tent … Revolving the incident in my mind, and dimly wondering what use he could have for a primus-pricker in the middle of the night, I again fell asleep … On inquiry I found that Filippo knew nothing of his midnight escapade. It was a touch of somnambulism.


The snow beating against the tent. Soft flakes piling up into hard, sculpted drifts, blown into aerodynamic contours – sastrugi. Snow is so soft and deep. And slushy-wet and burning-cold and diamond-hard. Snow is like sleep.

The day is stink of men and food and foul air, dogs barking, fingers pricked by needles which slip from the hands. It is the itch of an unwashed body, the rub of harness. It is longing for a hard steel hut, and desire for the wind to stop. Stop just once, just once long enough for us to stand clear and see – see that ethereal stillness so few feet above our heads – the silence of those infinite spaces.

This afternoon I found myself thinking about Melbourne, and that led me to the evening I met that girl. She was clean enough, I suppose, a scrubbed little thing – quite boyish as she minced along. I can’t remember what she said, what I said. We went back to her room (on my insistence), so I had to wait while she ran in to check that the coast was clear. That was strange, standing out in the alley thinking about what I was about to do, or rather trying not to think about it, smoking a cigarette and watching the shadows. She was back soon enough.

Once in her room I insisted she undress completely, although she was very reluctant. I could see why, afterwards. She had a long scar running down the length of her back – a long red curve of cicatrice. It must have been devilish deep at the time. A whip? Too clean for anything but a stock-whip at full stretch, I’d say. More likely a knife. I didn’t ask her about it. Felt ashamed to, I suppose. In any case, it didn’t make me any less interested in what I’d come to do.

10

you grope your own pants up and reach out the fifty dollars you had ready in the back pocket. He takes it and moves away with a smile, saying, as he goes, something to the effect of “goo’ night,” though it might well have been followed by “cocksucker” or “whitey” or some such epithet. It had, after all, been he who approached you, spoke to you, offered you sex for money; who tongued and fisted your cock hard; and who finally leant himself, his youthful arse, across the tombstone. The Golden Ass: Apuleius. Why didn’t he simply rob you, you wonder? The money was there all along.

It’s funny how a picture forms itself of many small items, half-apprehended. As you walk back up the slope to your car, through the dark whispering tracks of the cemetery, you think of a dream you once had, a long time ago, a dream where a stone statue turned itself head over heels through the grounds of a park, crushing its way, unstoppable, through ponds and woods and walls. His dark buttocks against the white of the tombstone seemed like an indignant sideways face, about to shout out hoarse commands. The rest of the black and white complex of leaves, shadows, trees might have been made to harmonise with this conception into an Arcimbaldo crowd-scene, faces made of bark and flax.

And what are they doing, the bizarre faces in this crowded canvas? They’re roaring blindly at the leper, the excluded one. Even a boy prostitute can be more in command of his moment, his place, than that bleeding face, shoulder bowed under the weight of a crosstree. So what does that make you? The crucified Christ? The martyr complex is the first thing to explode when the physical organism goes wrong. In this case, when the arsehole-fucking, graveyard-haunting, prostitute-poking, French novel-quoting, extreme experience-craving – Miracle-in-Mary-of-phlegm – blaspheming fucker cannot … cannot what?

GA

ZA

11

He and the other men start bailing as hard as they can, the water spraying in all directions.

Shot of the other women and children clinging to an upturned oil-drum.

• Scene [“There she goes” (Friday 6/11, c. 1.30 a.m.)]

MEDIUM CLOSE-UP of Angus and another man, Tiny, trying to resuscitate the sodden-looking body of an older man, a passenger. They’re rubbing at his arms ineffectually, and dosing him with little nips of brandy until he coughs and chokes.


WIDE-ANGLE of the boat, now full of miserable-looking people, many of them clearly injured. There’s perhaps a hint of light in the sky as the camera begins to move up from them to show the stricken ship sitting low in the water not far away. Other boats are circling around it like water-beetles.


The City of Cairo is shown silhouetted against the horizon in a succession of near stills, with gradually increasing light providing the time index.

A voice says: “There she goes,” and the ship’s bow lifts up and begins to slide back inexorably into the sea. It is dawn, now, a cold dawn.

12

“What?”

“Not Mister, Lieutenant.”

“Sorry, look, I’m being really rude here. I’m Hartnell and this is Baker, Julie Baker. It’s our job to look after the dormitory here, and answer the bell. Sit down, please. Can I get you anything? Coffee, water?”

He sat down, stiffly, in the chair furthest away from the long-haired woman, Julie. He felt she didn’t like him already, whereas the other one, short-haired Hartnell (probably a private, or at most corporal, given the job she was doing) was still reserving judgement. He found himself wondering what her first name was, and whether it was a pretty name. He hoped it was. They had warned him also of such emotional imbalances – at first, until his new system adjusted to the stresses and strains.

Objectively, he knew it was of minor importance whether the two young women liked him or not. He had a job to do and so did they – but what he knew and what he felt no longer connected in any meaningful way. He felt that if neither of the women gave him a kind word in the very near future he would howl like a dog in pain and disappointment. Their approval seemed to him, for the moment, the most important thing in the world.

“Please,” he said. “Please. I’m very tired.” And started to cry.

What once would have embarrassed him almost beyond endurance was now something of a relief. The tears flowed. At first he wiped them away with his sleeve, but then he found himself starting to sob, which necessitated covering his face with both hands. At length he stopped, and blew his nose. Only then did he think of the effect this might be having on the two women, who had been shortly before the centre of his universe.

Hartnell was now sitting next to Baker, who had her arms around the shoulders of her friend. They were looking at him with consternation – “Gob-struck,” he thought, proud to have recovered this useful word from his cerebrum.

He felt no need, now, to take the initiative or say the first word. He felt strangely at peace – as if, by humiliating himself so utterly before them, he no longer had any need to fear their reactions. The rest was up to them.

“What’s wrong?” the softer, more feminine girl Baker asked at length.

“Nothing,” he replied, perfectly deadpan and affectless once more. He knew that now they would not take him solely at face value.

“But … do you often do that?” she continued, apparently determined to pursue the matter to its conclusion.