A Stretch In Limousin – RSVP

I am blocked.

Like a hat in a Woody Allen short story. Like an artery. Like a sinus. Like a pervert on Twitter.

I figure maybe writing this will help.

At the beginning of September, I finished the first draft of a novel. It took me eight years to finish, on and off, with a break of about six years and a complete rewrite over the past eight months, in between extended bouts of sub-editing.

I don’t yet know whether it will be published or not, but I have a very nice agent who has been good enough to read it and who thinks we can sell it. The novel is about 320 pages long.

It’s about two estranged brothers getting to know one another, but more generally about families, the secrets they keep and the lies that they tell. It is set in Bologna, Lipari and Tulse Hill. When I first started writing it – in 2002 in Bologna – my goal was to write something that would make me feel better than the last unpublished novel I’d written, which lost me a couple of friends. I say friends….

I read Tropic of Cancer when I was 22 and had just moved to London. It killed me. That’s what I want to do! I thought. I want to move to a European city, get drunk every night and have sex with prostitutes. I want to talk about art, freeload off my foreign friends and write poignant, obscene poetry about the beauty of human degradation.

When I was 32 I moved to Italy. After four days in Milan, which I found unwelcoming and dour, I moved to Bologna. An Italian student in London had told me that Bologna was Italy’s least square city, so I always had it in mind if Milan didn’t work out.

I loved Bologna. I stayed there for four years and have never felt happier in any other place. It was vigorous and sexy and achingly beautiful. There were prostitutes too. Lots of them. Sadly – and part of me does feel sad about it – I never got to know any of them. But I did reread Tropic of Cancer and, as a kind of writing exercise, I started to try and write something similar.

It ended up being called Birth Marks and Love Bites, and it was a mess in many, many, many respects. Also, it wasn’t very pleasant. In fact, it was kind of horrible. But fun! There’s a chapter here, the story of a couple, an old lady and a dog. It’s one of the best bits.

I know, I know.

The first person who read it disliked it a lot and told me why. The second person liked it a lot and told me why. A couple of other people read it and said that they’d enjoyed it but I didn’t believe them. And most of the others I showed it to (another five or six people at least) never spoke to me again. Not necessarily because they’d been horribly offended; more probably because they’d read a bit of it, disliked it and not particularly relished the idea of having a conversation about it. Which is entirely fair enough. There’s nothing worse than having to tell a friend or an acquaintance that you think the thing that they’ve created is crap. I’ve been on both ends and it’s extremely awkward either way.

Anyhow, I sent chapters and synopses off to London and got another bunch of rejections and felt very miserable.

It was then that I decided to try and write something commercial. Wilfully so. It would be about ordinary people in increasingly extraordinary situations. There would be thrills, chills and romance. It would have a plot! Imagine.

So that’s what I tried to do.

When I’d finished, I showed it around, and people generally said they liked it, but inevitably no one wanted to publish it. When I read it a few years later, I realised it was mostly crap. So I kept about a quarter of it, and rewrote the rest. And here I am.

About a month ago, the agent read it and was nice enough to print it out and write all over it, so now I know exactly what I must do to finish it properly and prepare to try and sell it. I have to turn twin brothers into one character, and rewrite about five chapters set in the past to make them more realistic. It should be easy, I think, because I know what I have to do, but it’s proving the hardest part so far.

I had all of this week – a week off between subbing gigs – to get through it. Plus I had another week two weeks ago.

I haven’t done it.

I’m very very peeved about this.

So now I’m thinking, I can either beat myself up over it, or go and eat a Jamaican pattie and watch some crap at the cinema. Maybe that will ease the blockage.

Yes. I have made my choice. Bruce Willis, here I come.

Have a good weekend, you.

Anon!

On Monday night I went out with my old friend Steve, who lives in Burnley – of all places – but was in London Town for some capitalist gangbang or other. Steve works in IT. Which is a shame because he is capable of drawing things like this:

And this:

My housemate Laurel (surname Affs) finds many of Steve’s drawings rather repulsive. She is not alone in this. So do I. This one for example:

But then I rather like being repulsed. A lot of people don’t. (Especially the ladies.) Here’s one for the ladies:

Aww.

In my not enormously humble opinion, Steve is a hugely talented artist, so when I became possessed by Stan, it seemed only natural that he should supply the visuals. So I gave Stan a friend called Keith. Keith was a composite of a number of real-life friends, including Gee (from whom he took a predilection for taking drugs and a blueberry-shaped aneurysm in his brain), Alan of Spain (from whom he took his mild MS) and Steve (from whom he took, rather more directly, his artistic talent).

When Steve first started drawing from Keith’s point of view, I was very excited by the results, especially as I was kind of steering him. It was an honour for me. ‘You’ve just been told you have an aneurysm,’ I’d say, ‘and you might die at any moment. How does that make you feel?’

Like this, he said:

And this:

‘You’ve just been told you’ve got mild MS,’ I said. ‘You could be totally incapacitated by the time you’re 40. What do you see?’

He saw this:

And um… this:

One of the best things about working with Steve on Bête de Jour was bringing his sick skills to a slightly wider audience. Of course he has a wife and three fine children to keep him happy so he doesn’t really rely (as some of us do) on the validation of mercurial internet strangers, a sizeable percentage of whom are mentally unkempt. But still, we all like a bit of praise now and again for the talents that we have. And although he may not need it, I know he gets off on it. Of course he does. Plus, he sold a couple of pictures, and validation that you can actually see in your bank account is never, ever to be sneezed at.

I met Steve in Liverpool, by the way. We were students together, sharing halls of residence and later, a flat in Toxteth that was so toxic and repugnant, it was like the inside of a child molester’s lung. Steve and I became close friends and he told me dark secrets – darker than a 5B pencil – that I swore I would never share with anyone. However, I never said I wouldn’t vaguely allude to them decades later on a thing that would come to be known as ‘the internet’.

Do you know, he once went out with a girl who refused to kiss him after he’d gone down on her. She made him go and clean his teeth first.

I never said I wouldn’t tell anyone that. I’m sure that’s fine.

Anyway, I just wanted to pay tribute to my friend’s talent.

His blog is here.

There is a portfolio here.

And here he is on Twitter. You should follow him and say hello. He’s a lovely chap, even if he is from the North.

Hello, Steve! It was great to see you on Monday. You should come down again soon. Before one of us dies.

x

Barman: Why the long face?

Bannatyne: Who’s got a long face? What are you trying to say?

Barman: Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to offend you. I was just – it was just the first line of a joke, I…

Bannatyne: A joke? Is that your idea of a joke? You repeat that and I’ll sue you for every penny you’ll ever earn.

Barman: But –

Bannatyne: What if my boy, the wee man had heard that? And his friends? You know how cruel kids can be. What if my wife had heard it? What if – what was that?

Barman: What was what?

Bannatyne: Don’t come the innocent with me, Sonny Jim. What was that look you just gave me?

Barman: I – I honestly don’t know what you’re talking about. I think you might be mentally ill.

Bannatyne: You must think I was born yesterday, do you? Are you saying I’m paranoid, is that what you’re saying?

Barman: I –

Bannatyne: I saw it, man! I’m not a child! When I mentioned my wife, something passed over your eyes. You’re saying she’s having an affair. Is that what you’re saying?

Barman: Listen, mate. I don’t know what’s going on in your personal life, but you’re behaving a little bit strangely here, and there are people watching – you might want to tone it down a little. This might end up embarrassing your kids a little more than if you’d just kept your mouth shut.

Bannatyne: Don’t you fucking DARE tell me I’m behaving strangely. DON’T YOU DARE! Do you know who I am? Do you know how much money I earned last year. I had nothing when I was growing up. Nothing! I WAS BORN IN A SEWER! Now I’m one of the richest men in the world! I am an entrepreneur! I AM A PHILANTHROPIST!!! Do you have any idea how many children’s lives I have saved? I should be made a fucking GOD and you have the temerity to stand there and tell me fucking jokes about my wife and children?!

Barman: I’m sorry, mate. Please calm down. This is a family pub. There are kids over there, you’re frightening them….

Bannatyne: Don’t you bully me. I piss in your kids’ eyes without the slightest hint of hypocrisy. I am the Lord God Duncan Bannatyne and I will NOT be intimidated or questioned or even looked at in the wrong way by you or by anyone else. I’ll tell you where YOU are now, you impudent swine: YOU’RE FIRED.

Barman: That’s the wrong catchphrase, mate.

Bannatyne: Then you’re barred! Get out of my sight.

Barman: It’s my pub, mate.

Bannatyne: Then I will buy it from you and burn it to the ground. How much do you want for it?

Barman: Listen, Mr Bannatyne. I don’t want your money. I’m happy that you’ve got so much of it, I really am. Although frankly speaking, it doesn’t seem to have made you very happy. Which – now that I come to think about it – is probably why you’ve got such a long face.

Bannatyne: But –

Barman: I think you should leave.

Bannatyne: Can I tell you where I am now?

Barman: Just leave.

This joke is a response to something that happened this weekend on Twitter. It is explained here.

Just in case there is any question, let me just ram the message home: IT IS A JOKE and is not meant to imply that Duncan Bannatyne’s wife is having an affair (although she might be, and few could blame her) or that Duncan Bannatyne has no sense of humour. He definitely does. He makes jokes about suicide.

Michael Cera is brilliant as the actor Jesse Eisenberg who plays Mark Zuckerberg (Walt Baumbach in Juno), the high-functioning code-golem who filched the bones of the idea for Facebook from the Winklevoss twins, played with surprising restraint by a heavily pumped-up and prostheticised Jedward.

Aaron Sorkin’s script is – as they say – dazzling. Lots and lots and lots and lots of words, many of them very funny, all of them smart as a whip in a Harvard dungeon. Only one f-bomb though (‘fuck’, not ‘Facebook’) because this is a film about social networking and the 12-certificate demographic is vital. Unfortunately, as evidenced at the Peckham preview I attended last week, the younger they are, the less they tend to give a damn about words – presumably they expected that Zuckerberg would just be throwing sheep and poking them in 3D for an hour and a half – so in the end I had to throw a couple of f-bombs of my own to silence the little cunts.

David Fincher’s direction is pretty dazzling too – especially considering that most of the film consists of the eminently subhuman, irritatingly brilliant Zuckerberg hunched over a computer or smart-mouthing sociopathically in various scenes of in camera legal shenanigans.

The film rattles along primarily because it’s populated by unsmiling monsters and you can’t help be fascinated by them, especially if you used to work for an internet start-up and met a lot of properly hideous scumbags cut from the same narcissistic, self-serving, rapacious cloth.

Timbaland is also very good as Google spiderman Sean Parker.

On the whole, splendid. In fact…

I would go that far.

So I took part in Literary Death Match last night. I was up against a man called Bruno Vincent who read a bunch of funny anecdotes from his book Middle Class Nightmares. I read the extract from my book about meeting Avril, the disabled girl to whom Stan begifted his virginity. I read all right, a bit too fast and a little nervously as was kind of inevitable, but no massive stumbling, no Nigella-style twitching and gurning, and no projectile vomiting. And when I think back on the whole event, although I do start singing or humming involuntarily, I don’t punch myself in the face, which is definitely progress.

After the reading, participants in LDM are critiqued by a panel of three ‘experts’ and one of each pair is knocked from the competition. You may have deduced from my ironically judgmental use of inverted commas that I did not make it to the final. The first of the judges, Emma, who organises ‘literary’ evenings and eats honey and bread, compared what I’d read to The Inbetweeners. Now I generally enjoy The Inbetweeners when I watch it, but in my opinion the extract I read had very very little in common with it. Which made me, I must say, a little skeptical about Emma’s fitness to assess literary style, as per her remit. But of course I could just be a simmering ball of bitterness and resentment. That’s very possible.

The second half of the event featured Niven Govinden and Dan Holloway, both of whom I had been chatting with in the run-up to the readings and both of whom were splendid and lovely fellows. Emma was the first to critique Niven. First she commiserated with him for following two ‘comedic writers’ with quite a dark, serious piece. She then went on to describe the same dark, serious piece as ‘hilarious’. I don’t think she’d been drinking, but her reference to The Inbetweeners now made more sense. She was an imbecile.

I joke, of course. I’m sure she’s bright as a button in real life.

A lot of people – not me – but a lot of people were saying that I was robbed. But then people always say that to losers. (Especially if it’s true.) What was particularly nice, however, was hearing it from two very lovely women I’d never met before. One was a woman called Aisley who said hello to me at the bar. I should really have sought her out after the event and ascertained whether I was correct or not in my assumption that one of the men she was with was her boyfriend, but then I’m out of practice. Aisley was lovely. I’m hoping she finds this and gets in touch and asks me to take her to Antigua but then settles for Soho.

The other one was Molly Parkin.

Molly Parkin was lovely too. And I’m not saying that just because she said she loved what I read and because we talked for a few minutes in the intermission about Italy and stuff. I’m saying that also partly because she accused the guy I was up against of coming across as a twerp and a cunt, which is a delicious cocktail of insults if ever there was one. And also partly because she was the only one of the judges who came across as really knowing what she was talking about – no disrespect to the others – and she said the fact that I didn’t win my round was ‘scandalous’.

A lot of people – not me – but a lot of people agreed.

Anyhow, failure and concomitant bitterness aside, it was fun on the whole and it really is the taking part that counts. (It really isn’t.) (No, it is.) (Kind of.) And then I went and drank till 3 with some lovely people.

And now I have ten days off work to finish – of all things – writing a novel.

Wish me luck.

Anon!

Nisha Panipat. Crawled on her belly up the banks of the Ganges, burning corpses still clinging to her body, the sting of charred flesh forever on her skin. She was a strange bird all told, for whom a subtle finger in the rectum was never enough. You’d have her handcuffed to the bedstead and blindfolded, fucking her from behind with half a coconut sticking out of her arse and she’d still want you to tell her she was beautiful. No wonder she went out how she did, swimming in semen with spent white bodies stuck to her skin like seaweed.

I used to go over to her house when I’d finished work, like a good little boy, like the fuck-struck little lapdog I was, padding up the stairs on all fours, my tongue flapping around my ankles picking up dust. And she’d be waiting for me, with her vagina fresh as a mountain spring, polished pink and powdered. And I would launch myself at it, splash into it from a great height like a fat stone dropped in a pond. Hours later I would resurface and Nisha would cook me rice and bhajis, always managing to smear a little of whatever we ate across herself and have me tongue it off or out of her. Sometimes she would stuff so much cucumber yoghurt inside her that I thought I would choke.

But we had a wonderful time, Nisha and I. Visiting each other’s houses with nothing but good honest, dirty stinking love on our minds. She lived on the fourth floor of an apartment building on Via Murri. I was there three or four times a week for six months probably, invariably bumping into her neighbour on my way up the stairs. The Signora Vignocchi, four hundred years old but still dressed like a hooker, trailing behind her on an expensive strip of leather an emaciated rat called Carlito. One of those dastardly brilliant rodents that fools old women into thinking it’s a dog, thus securing home comforts and three square meals a day, the only downside being that it has to spend every waking hour in the perfumed presence of some cadaver that won’t lie down.

When you saw the Signora Vignocchi and Carlito shuffling toward you down the stairs, you never really knew who to feel sorriest for. I had so much natural loathing for both of them that all I could possibly do was bury it and pretend to adore them. That first meeting on the stairs. My instinct to grab hold of Carlito, pick it up by the head and squeeze till there was nothing left. But instead something inside converted the hatred to delight. Instead I was bending over the rat, its pointy little face rearing away from my hand, its enormous disproportionate eyes rolling back in fear, its toothpick-thin legs tapping away across the tiles. ‘But he’s gorgeous,’ I heard myself declaring. The old bag beamed down at me with pride. ‘Don’t be afraid, Carlito,’ she said. ‘The man doesn’t want to hurt you.’ Then to me, ‘His name is Carlito,’ she told me.

‘And I am Carlo,’ I told her. ‘We are brothers, Carlito and I.’ And how right I was. We were both spineless rodents, completely dependent on the all-powerful queens to whom we had happily saddled ourselves.

The Signora introduced herself to me. She was wearing, on that first day, if my memory serves me correctly, and I fear that it does, she was wearing a full-length fur coat, pearls like ostrich eggs and a long blonde wig. She may even have got away with it too, if it wasn’t for the fact that her face showed each of her four centuries, one after the other, in graphic gory detail.

Imagine a skull. A human skull picked clean by bugs and weevils, the bone quite white, and shining. Place a couple of yellowing billiard balls in the eye sockets and a set of oversized plastic gnashers in the cavity where the mouth should be. Then trowel on the heaviest-handed most garish make-up imaginable. A layer of foundation for each dead husband, each long-gone layer of skin.

Imagine a lipless grin plastered into position with the precision of a paint-gun. Lipstick, thickly spread, like frozen butter on soft white bread. Lidless eyes that were really more like hard boiled eggs when you plucked up the courage to examine them closely; glaring, haloed unnaturally like bruises that will not fade.

Keep looking at that skull. It has no cheeks, but is sporting great lakes of blood-red rouge. It has pencil-strokes for eyebrows and a veneer of something greasy and ghastly, something that makes everything shine. I imagine that once the paint-job is finished, her face must have been sprayed with some glossy fixative to keep all the chemicals and plastic in place. Her face is a botulism of fluorescent. No wonder poor Carlito shudders so. I gave his little tail a tweak, perhaps too hard, and he scowled at me.

When she introduced herself, the Signora Vignocchi, I took her gloved hand and brushed my lips over the knuckles, a rash gesture which left both of us quite breathless. She seemed close to some kind of seizure. For my own part, I retched silently, the sugary stench of her perfume stiffening in my throat.

‘It is an enormous pleasure,’ I said.

‘Ooh, you are English,’ she cooed.

‘A little,’ I confessed.

‘Do you live in this block?’ she inquired. ‘I haven’t seen you before.’

‘I have a friend,’ I said, gesturing up the stairs.

She bent towards me, her hard boiled billiard balls rattling in their pockets. ‘A lady friend?’

I pretended to be embarrassed and furtive and with a little smile nodded my head.

‘You are very handsome. You must come and read to me one evening,’ she said.

‘It would be an honour,’ I told her.

‘Well, good day. Come along, Carlito.’ Quite charming, all said. In a grotesque kind of way.

‘She’s a racist old cunt,’ snapped Nisha when I told her of the meeting.

I laughed. Everyone was racist, according to Nisha. Including myself, my friends, even fellow Indians were either racist, caste-prejudiced or prone to linguistic or religious discrimination. I laughed heartily, but she was almost certainly right.

‘Let’s fuck,’ I said.

She poked me in the ribs. ‘Don’t use that word!’ she ordered.

She was a funny old bird, Nisha.

I continued to meet the Signora on the stairs at regular intervals. We became quite close, although I was always afraid I was going to vomit on her. And Nisha continued to deride her whenever I mentioned her. It got to such a point that I only mentioned her to rile Nisha.

Then one day we all met on the stairs together and Nisha was as nice as pie to the old lady. The Signora petted her with one of her bony gloves, calling her all the while, ‘My beautiful brave girl.’

‘Oh, you’re so lucky,’ she cried. ‘The Englishman is yours. But he is so handsome. You make a beautiful couple. Don’t they, Carlito? Oh, Carlito, please, calm yourself!’

But Carlito was going crazy. He clearly had an enormous horn for Nisha. He was darting in between her legs, rubbing himself against her more like a cat than a rat, looking up her skirt and trying to fuck her leather boots. Nisha bent down to pet him and he practically exploded.

A few seconds later and there was the most awful piercing sulphuric smell. Instinctively I lifted a hand to my face. This prompted the old lady to say, in rather hushed tones, as befitting a matter of such delicacy, that poor little Carlito was rather getting on in years and didn’t have the control he once had.

But I reckon it was her.

It was later that same night, Nisha and I were eating and there was a knock at the front door. It was the Signora. She had a favour to ask. It was clearly another delicate matter as she had lowered her voice and was casting glances from side to side. I invited her in. I was wearing a dressing gown, which she observed flirtatiously before half-winking at me and shuffling forward into the hall. I checked behind her for Carlito, my brother in arms, but there was no sign. Nisha came out of the bedroom in a tee-shirt that came down to her knees. They kissed a brief greeting, more of a subtle brush of the cheeks, and a clump of the Signora’s face fell to the floor. She took a deep breath, as if taking in the stench of sex that wafted from Nisha’s body, and allowed herself another knowing twist of her plaster mask before proceeding to tell us the story.

It was a sad story. She had a friend that had died. Another. It seemed that everyone was dying on her these days. But of course that was to be expected at her age. She didn’t really mind – she’d had a good innings after all – but as long as she wasn’t the last to go, that was all she asked. But then she didn’t want to pop off too early and leave poor Carlito to fend for himself either. He was all she had in the world, you know. Oh, and it was about Carlito she had dropped by.

She had a friend that had died. Cancer it was. But he’d been fighting it for years, God rest his soul. The doctors said they’d never known anyone of his age put up such a valiant fight. He was a real Trojan. But then he’d always been strong. She’d known him since they were teenagers together, in the twelfth century BC, and if she was to hint that there had on occasion been a little electricity in the air when the two of them got together, well, you get the picture. Strong as an ox and with the heart of a lion. Gentle but firm. A real gentleman, but if you overstepped the mark, you’d feel the back of his hand.

Cancer it was. Just like his wife. A tart by all accounts. He deserved much better in life, but there you are. That’s life. What can you do? Anyway, he’s dead now. And that’s why she was here, to talk about the funeral.

The funeral was on Sunday. But in her home town in Puglia. She had to make the visit and thought she might make a weekend of it, meet up with some old friends, a bit of a chinwag, you know how it is. But Carlito is not as young as he used to be, and he never was a great traveller. Tends to cry and throw up a lot. So, she was wondering….

As soon as she set off for Puglia on Friday morning, Nisha and I moved into her flat more or less for the weekend. It was no better than Nisha’s flat, in fact it was foul in comparison, full of musty old memories and pissy shivers. But it was Nisha. She wanted to make love in an old woman’s bed. And in an old woman’s kitchen. In an old woman’s bath, an old woman’s armchair, and old woman’s wardrobe – even, and this is where I almost drew the line – and would have if it hadn’t turned me on so much – even in an old woman’s clothes.

But we were very careful. We brought in sheets and blankets from Nisha’s flat and covered whichever surface we were slithering around on, so as not to leave tell-tale stains.

And we spent the entire weekend fucking each other to pieces in a flat that was so like a dead place, it was at times eerie – made all the more so by the omnipresent Carlito, who would trail from one room to the other watching, sitting close by, licking his lips and every now and then trying hard to join in. Occasionally he would be lapping away at some red raw orifice or appendage for a good few minutes before I’d realised it wasn’t Nisha, then I’d swat him away and he’d scamper into a corner bleating.

It is Sunday night when I nip next door to Nisha’s to fetch more wine. We’ve been having sex for two full days and are both as sore as bloodied soldiers. We’ve been laughing about the fact, and have both acknowledged that we are finished, that we will neither of us have sex again as long as we live. But sure enough, as I return to the old woman’s living room, one of the TV channels has started showing soft-porn trailers for chat lines, two alleged lesbians are sucking each other’s tongues and nipples and Nisha is gasping and groaning with her hands between her legs. I laugh. ‘You just can’t leave it alone, can you?’ And then as I round the sofa in front of which Nisha is spread-eagled, I realise she isn’t masturbating over the lesbians at all. Instead she has Carlito by the ears and is guiding his lapping tongue in and out of the open heart of her cunt.

‘Oh my God!’ I scream. ‘That is the fucking limit!’

Her head is thrown back in ecstasy – whether she’s faking it or not I will never know – but she is smiling, half-laughing, as she moans, ‘Oh, Christ, Carlito – don’t stop don’t stop don’t stop – yes, yes, yes!’ Then she reaches some sort of climax – again, real or not, I cannot say, but the fact is that I am now so aroused again that none of this seems unusual in any way. She is holding Carlito away from her ladyhood. He is still straining to get at her. It seems he could lick her all night long. Her hand rubs over her wetness and she looks up at me. I am standing in the old woman’s dressing gown, a bottle of wine in one hand and my blistered cock in the other.

‘Get that inside me now,’ she demands.

I decide she means my cock and not the bottle, so I put down the wine and move towards her. I attempt to take off the old woman’s dressing gown but Nisha begs me to leave it on. As she reaches up to me, Carlito rushes back between her legs and his snout disappears inside of her. She cries out. As do I.

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, no! Get rid of that fucking rat and go and wash yourself. I’m not coming anywhere near you with that dog’s breath on your cunt.’

‘Oh, don’t be such an English retard, please. Come on! Make love to me!’

I stand my ground. ‘Fuck that. I’m not putting my dick in… in dog food. No way.’

‘Well, to hell with you!’ she screams. Then she addresses Carlito. ‘We don’t need him, do we, my gorgeous stud?’ She picks up Carlito and locates his cock. It is a luminous red jelly bean.

‘No,’ I cry. There is pleading in my voice. ‘Please, Nisha. Don’t fuck that dog!’

But there is no stopping her. Once she gets an idea in her head…

And it was odd, watching her. With one hand she had the rat by the scruff of its neck, the way you hold a kitten when you’re lowering it into a sack of bricks. With the other she had hold of its lower back and was pushing the beast’s midriff into her ladyhood violently. Frankly it didn’t seem like either of them were enjoying it very much. Carlito’s back legs were clawing away sporadically at Nisha’s thighs, leaving white lines which quickly turned red. His face was a paralysed portrait of something startled. He looked completely out of his depth. He seemed to be thinking, ‘Hold on a minute, love. It was just a bit of fun.’ But it was too late for that.

Nisha meanwhile was glaring wide-mouthed at the show she was enacting between her own legs. She was gasping but it seemed more of a gasp of horror than lust. Then, within seconds of her settling into a reasonable rhythm, she let out a soul-churning voiceless squeal and, drawing Carlito further in with her thighs, almost pushed him completely inside.

After an aching pause in which she gasped and shuddered as if in desperate need of air, she finally opened her legs and lifted the limp body of Carlito out of her muff. He’s dead, I thought. But after a sudden shudder that seemed to bring him round, he limped away slowly, glancing back at Nisha with what seemed a slyly smug smile hanging from his glistening nose. Then he settled down and licked himself. I half expected him to light up a cigarette.

I looked down at Nisha. Her head was lolling around, her body as limp as Carlito’s. She began to hum a sleepy, self-satisfied tune. A slither of dog-semen trickled down the crease between her legs and dropped gloopily onto the sheet beneath her.

‘You know,’ she said, ‘in human years, that dog is a hundred and fourteen years old, and yet….’ She looked up at me accusingly. ‘That was the best fuck I have ever had.’ She laughed. Then she rolled over onto all fours and spread her legs wide apart.

However, to spare you the graphic details, I felt at that point that I had a point to prove. I was not going to be out-manoeuvred by a geriatric house-mouse. Plus I was, despite the revulsion that I felt – and still feel, believe me; recounting this is no picnic – but despite that revulsion, I don’t believe I have ever been quite so excited in all my days. Having said that, I also had a point to prove about personal hygiene, and as Nisha clearly had no intention of washing up her dog-bowl, I had no other option but to go round the back door, like the guttersnipe son of a tradesman I surely am.

Obviously, anal sex is nothing new to a girl like Nisha. However, what with the mood we were both in after such a strange weekend, I don’t know…. Let’s just say it got curiously violent. The ferocity was, in the end, quite frightening.

When we had finished, we showered together. There had been a little fall-out at the end so we washed the spoiled sheet too. Washed it together and left it to steep. Then we held each other gently in the warm, soft-water shower. I was bleeding. My penis was torn around the foreskin, quite badly. A war wound. Nisha washed it for me with incredible tenderness and sensitivity. We were both eerily calm, hardly speaking; the words that did come meant to soothe and comfort. We held each other in the hot steamy spray of the ancient shower head and sighed. Nisha lifted her face to me, her eyes wide and water streaming across them. She looked at me unblinking and told me, almost solemnly, ‘I will always love you.’

Back in the living room, we switched off the television set, dried ourselves in front of its dead face, then settled down together on the settee. Like this, in the soft glow of thick-shaded table lamp, we drifted off into sleep. It was around three a.m.

When we awoke at seven, the air was thick with the smell of excrement.

We looked into each other’s eyes and horror dawned like a shadow on a lung.

Something had given in the night. Something inside Nisha. Without waking up she had voided her bowels. Her buttocks were pushed up against my groin at the time, but the motion was soft enough to have slipped between our naked bodies and onto the uncovered sofa beneath us. The sofa was made, not of a heavy brown material, which might have made the task ahead a little less daunting, but of a pristine white cotton. We extricated ourselves slowly. There was blood mixed in with the excrement. From whose body it was impossible to say. Carlito cowered in a corner. The Signora was due back in four hours.

Two days later in the early evening I cycled round to Nisha’s after some teaching job or other, as was my wont. And, as often happened, I encountered the Signora on the stairs. But she was a changed woman. She still had on one of her wigs, and the fur coat was the same, but her face….

It took me a moment or two to realise what was different.

She wasn’t wearing any make up. Her face was transformed. It was maybe a third of the size, tiny and frail and soft like an inedible apricot.

She moved down the stairs like something being lowered on a wire, slowly, methodically. Her hand, gloveless, clutched the banister like transparent wax, veined and angular, sliding, moving painfully slowly. I was moving slowly too as I ascended, my heart beating in my throat.

I stood there for what seemed like an age as she jerked her silent way past me.

I said nothing. She saw nothing.

Nisha had been left with no choice but to blame Carlito for the stain that would not go away. ‘What could I do?’ she pleaded. ‘I couldn’t tell her the truth.’ And then all the next day, the Signora had been fluttering around Nisha’s apartment, terrified that Carlito was dying on her. His appetite had gone, she said. He seemed changed. Had anything happened, she wanted to know.

That same day she called out a vet. And Nisha tells me, with tears in her eyes, that her heart was breaking when the vet said that there was nothing wrong with Carlito – he actually seemed remarkably healthy – a couple of small hairs stuck in the back of his throat, but once they were removed, he seemed incredibly chipper – but, the simple sad truth of the matter is, if he’s started involuntarily voiding his bowels, then maybe, maybe he’s just too old. Maybe it’s nature’s way, he said, of saying that the autumn years are drawing to a close. And now that it had begun, he said, in this particularly unpleasant manner, it was unlikely to be a graceful demise.

A few more lines of heart-breakingly insensitive sales pitch and the Signora was staggering to her bedroom in search of her cheque book.

She wasn’t to worry. For the right price, Carlito would have a send off fit for a king.

Then the Signora crouched down and raised Carlito to her lips. She held the dog in her arms and wept over him, becoming hysterical, begging him to forgive her, repeating over and over that she had watched Vittorio die and it had simply been too much. She couldn’t go through that again. And it was for his sake, she insisted. She couldn’t bear to see him suffering.

Nisha went with her to the vet’s. Both of them crying all the way there. Nisha racked with guilt, on the verge of telling the truth. ‘It was I!’ she wanted to cry. ‘I who soiled your sofa! Carlito is innocent!’

But in the end she never did.

Carlito was taken from us that same evening. Lethal injection. The vet attempting to convince Nisha that he would actually enjoy it, that his last sensations would be pleasurable. Not bad. That’s how I’d like to go.

The day after she passed me on the stairs, the Signora was found dead in her bed.

Nisha found her. She had kept hold of the keys and been in and out checking on the Signora since they got back from the vet’s on Monday night.

When she found her, she called me, but I was already on my way over.

We waited with her for the ambulance. Without her wig, she was more or less completely bald. She lay on her back, her eyes and mouth closed and yes, she did look dignified. A head very like a raisin, but there was no doubting her dignity in death.

The moral, if indeed there is one, is complicated, and certainly beyond my comprehension. But it is surely somewhere tangled up in the final detail of the story, which is that shortly before the Signora made her choice to shuffle into the next world, she rewrote her will and left everything, including the clothes the beneficiary had already fucked in, to Nisha.

On Wednesday I will be taking part in something called Literary Death Match. Basically, we – me and some other lesser writers (my arrogance is a joke, like Ice T’s) – will read from our books for no more than seven minutes, then we will be judged, questioned and mocked by Molly Parkin and others, then the best of us will get to kick bananas into a goal, land a remote-controlled helicopter on a magazine or something of that nature. (Possibly a giant game of Jenga using members of the audience.) If I’m honest, it all sounds like fun. But that doesn’t mean I’m not terrified. Because I am.

After all, speaking in public – let alone reading your own words in public – is terrifying.

The first time I was called on to speak in public was when I was about 10 years old and I had to stand before my class and explain what Durham House had done in the last month. This was because I had just been made captain of Durham House because I was good at reading and riting and rithmatic, but what I wasn’t good at was standing in front of people and talking. I couldn’t do it. Instead I just stood there in absolute broiling agony and looked at the ground and shuffled my feet and said ‘I don’t know’ two or three times. Eventually the teacher put me out of my misery and made someone else captain of Durham House.

Later in my school career, I was forced to take part in a school play. The part was ‘The Obstinate Man’. Ironically, I obstinately refused to do anything apart from stand there in absolute broiling agony, look at the ground, shuffle my feet and mutter my lines with all the vigour and dramatic majesty of a dishcloth. Or a wet Yorkshire pudding. Eventually the teacher put me out of my misery and made someone else play The Obstinate Man.

After that I managed to keep myself out of the spotlight until I was in my late 20s and living in Istanbul. (This meant missing almost four years of seminars at college because the thought of speaking in front of even as few as ten other people terrified me.)

In Istanbul, however, I had run out of the unskilled building trade money I had made in England and even though I was there with a girlfriend who had a job which came with an apartment and all, I had to grow up and get a job. Obviously, the only job I could feasibly do in such an unforgivingly foreign land was teach English, so I obtained a forged certificate and before I knew it I was standing in a meeting room in a Nissan factory in Bahçelievler with 15 or so eager Turks sitting around me, looking at me expectantly. At the time, I didn’t even know what the infinitive was. But I knew how to broil. It was a baptism of fire.

But I got through it.

A couple of months later I was offered the opportunity to give a series of three lectures to Turkish teachers of English on behalf of Penguin Readers. These are basically graded versions of English books and films for foreigners, ranging from absolute beginners to advanced students. I said yes. Then I started to panic.

The first lecture was in Ankara in front of an audience of about 70 teachers. Using fairly antiquated AV equipment I gave examples of how to teach Mrs Doubtfire and Gone With the Wind. I was very very nervous. I had diarrhoea. Not onstage thankfully but beforehand. And a couple of mostly dry heaves.

When delivering the first part of the script I had written, I spoke very very quickly, because I was scared. As the lecture progressed, however, it became a lot more interactive and I settled down and began to breathe. It wasn’t great. But I got through it.

The second one was better, apart from a very poorly judged joke I made – based on Gone With the Wind – about Turkey possibly heading for another in a long line of calamitous civil wars. Oops.

At the third lecture – in Istanbul – there were about 200 people, which was daunting, but I kind of knew what I was doing by then and it went really well. I even got a bunch of flowers at the end and felt – for a moment – like a minor royal.

Since then, as far as doing things in public is concerned, I co-hosted a couple of London-related book quizzes in Borders a few years ago, which went well, and I read a poem at a friend’s wedding, which went appallingly.

I don’t know why, but I just couldn’t relax. My right hand kept rising to my face, my thumb wiping my forehead involuntarily, pointlessly. I had developed a twitch. It was like A Beautiful Mind, and I was reading with no breath like I used to at school and later at college with that tension in my neck like something ticking and tocking and threatening to explode. It depressed the fuck out of me. Everyone else pretended not to notice. But they lied.

Then I wrote a book pretending to be a large, deformed man, and on the back of that I did a bunch of radio interviews. I also went on GMTV and Canada AM with a paper bag on my head.

Someone said to me last week, ‘How can you be nervous about reading from your book when you went on GMTV with a bag on your head?’

I don’t know what the answer is, except that I was nervous about GMTV too. It probably helped that I was still a little drunk from the night before.

Thinking about it, that’s probably the answer for Wednesday. Drunkenness. Not too much obviously. But some.

I just – I don’t mind losing… I just don’t want to make a fool of myself. I have an intense instinctive terror of making a fool of myself.

So!

Come along if you like. It’s in Shoreditch. I’ll be there from about 6.30, drinking wine and smoking crystal meth.

PS If I do not win, I will take my own life. Are you listening, Molly Parkin? My blood will be on your hands.

I am writing this in the spare bedroom of my friend Paddy. I am currently staying with Paddy and his girlfriend Laurel, rent-free, probably just for another few weeks at most because I have a terrible fear of outstaying my welcome and consequently curdling what have so far proved two beautiful friendships. Yes, beautiful.

The reason I am freeloading here and not living in my own house or flat, as you might reasonably expect any independent, able-bodied and not unintelligent human to be doing at 42 years old, is because I am at something of a crossroads. Quite an exciting one too, but for the moment, today, I am very annoyed with myself.

I have just started reading Eat Pray Love. It’s research for a project I’m trying to get off the ground, but I have no qualms about admitting, only a few pages in, I’m enjoying it. I’m enjoying it because Elizabeth Gilbert writes well. Unlike – in my most humble opinion – the author of the last book I read as part of my research, which was Twitchhiker. I don’t want to be unpleasant to the author, as I’m sure he’s a perfectly lovely man when he isn’t insulting people’s mothers, but I wasn’t a fan of his writing style. In fact, his clunking construction and endless scatology made me quite upset. But that’s not why I’m annoyed with myself.

I’m annoyed with myself for pretty much the same reason I’m always annoyed with myself – because I’m lazy. Or perhaps undisciplined is a better description. I lack discipline. Eat Pray Love reminded me. I need to get on. I’ll be dead soon. Relatively.

So what I’ve decided to do is just shut the fuck up and get on with it. But without shutting the fuck up. I’ve decided to start blogging again, like regularly, without caring about who’s listening, and even if no one is, because the act gives me impetus. If I were a coward, I would close comments. Well, I am a coward, but not that big a coward.

So, blogging. Impetus. Crossroads.

Oh, and I am now also launching regular Tumblrweeds. God be praised.

Tomorrow: the spectre of public humiliation.

Anon!