SelaFane 2: Where Are We Now?

The day juddered into some semblance of life. In the tunnels under the city mail trains disgorged their loads, including, amongst the tons of envelopes and packaging some forty-seven spools of processed Super-8, only four of which need concern us.

In the streets above, paper vans jettisoned their daily piles of happy news. A local councillor implicated in the selling-off of fresh-dug graves to a small but extremely industrious ring of necrophiles. A cabinet minister fingered for the manufacturing of Semtex in his garden shed and selling it off to the highest bidder. A back-bench member of parliament found hanging by his nipples in a Mayfair flat with a plastic bag over his head and three live lobsters in little knitted berets up his backside.

The usual drill, basically, and pretty-much par for the course for the people who took a country made of coal and floating in a sea of oil and cod, sold everything that wasn’t nailed down and then shat on the pitifully whimpering wreckage of everything that remained from a height.

Anyhow, and more to the point in hand, some two weeks before, the National Bi Conference had been held, but partly due to a small mix-up with the Associated Press, and partly due to the vagaries of newspaper scheduling anyway, only now was there a press response - i.e. everybody, gay or straight, other than The Guardian and what for various reasons we shall refer to simply if not entirely originally as The Scum, completely and utterly ignored it.

The Guardian piece was vaguely friendly - if leaving one with the impression that to be bisexual was to be a sociology student with a straggly beard, a control complex and a beergut. Or, if one were male, a New Man of such cloying supersensitivity as to cause instant diabetic collapse in whosoever so much as beheld one.

The Scum on the other hand, with the tolerance and restraint for which it was justly famous, told of how cleaners in a university halls of residence were SHOCKED to find USED CONDOMS and MASKS having slithering THREE-IN-A-BED SEX and how the full, lurid details, together with shots of a couple of supremely bored models done up like lipstick lesbians and licking oysters off each other, would be available in the Sunday Filth.

* * *

And in a black room lit flickering by scattered candles, Kara Davies hauled herself up onto one elbow and lightly traced an arabesqued nipple with her free hand; gripped it gently between fingernails, absently traced the aureole with a fingertip. ‘I just love looking at you. I can’t keep my eyes off you.’

‘Mm?’ Micqui Blaine pressed a cheek to Kara’s side, looked up at her, eyes turned simultaneously dark and flaring, like polished onyx, in the candle light. She smiled. She couldn’t stop smiling.

‘You can look at what you like,’ she said, her voice warm and drowsy with a contentment that had nothing much to do with sleep.

She pressed her body closer - and was surprised by her sudden surge of hot and engorged wetness. She parted her thighs and slid herself slowly up and down a small section of Kara’s thigh. ‘You can do what you like.’

She had never, quite, felt this before; this fever-heat, the sense of bodies perfectly moulded together, meshing so completely.

Micqui looked back upon some of the mildly rougher stuff that would, ordinarily, back home, have taken careful and sober negotiation after a relationship lasting maybe a month or more, and she was mildly shocked.

The scratching and the biting and the slapping around that had to be finely judged, completely under control and was never quite gotten exactly right had, had suddenly, miraculously, at the hands and mouth of this English woman, this stranger she had met barely nine hours before, become everything she had ever wanted or dreamed.

She had mauled and been mauled by some fabulous beast that was somehow both an extension of herself and something utterly other and, frankly, since this is getting far too lovey-dovey by half, she had come her brains out.

NEXT: How Did We Get Here?

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Things to Drink 1: Proper Bovril

(I was really, really, gonna put up the chapter of SelaFane with Hot Lesbo Action in it, but I came down with a cold … and being a shut-in I'd avoided colds for a couple of years, so it hit me like a ton. This got me thinking about stuff to drink thro it.)

Anybody of a certain age, on a cold day, will remember cups of Hot Bovril - or, at at a pinch, OXO cubes in hot water - and for us it's like a rocket back to childhood. And, like many aspects of our childhood, it could so with some distinct improvement. So:

- Cup of Hot Bovril (or Hot OXO) to which you add …

- Big splosh of lemon juice.
- Good big shake of Tabasco
- Grind of black pepper
- A measure of Vodka
- A splosh of dry sherry

And that really perks you up and makes you feel better.

But Dave, I hear you ask, why do you put alcohol in a hot drink? Won't it boil off?

To which I respond: HOW THE FUCK DID YOU GET INTO MY ROOM? I'VE GOT A KNIFE HERE! I'LL CUT YOU WITH MY KNIFE IF YOU COME A STEP CLOSER!

After I've calmed down a little, I respond thus: You are dumb to think alcohol boils off in stuff. Yes, alcohol has a boiling-point of like seventy degrees, but water has a boiling point of a hundred degrees, and all the water doesn't suddenly vanish when you boil it in a kettle.

You are so dumb you might as well be called Mister Dumb, on account of how dumb you are.

And now you're suitably chastised, here's some other hot drinks you can dump alcoholic stuff in:

- Tea with brandy. There's a certain interaction between the grape-based spirit and the tannins that elevate it into something other than yer Irish Coffee stuff.
- Hot milk and Scotch, with a dusting of cinnamon. (I prefer a really nice bourbon, personally, when I want something sweeter than scotch. Also, a sweet brandy like Metaxa goes really well with hot milk.
- Mulled beer. Use a really strong dark beer with any mulled-wine recipe you can think of, and it's all the better for it.

Long story short, there's nothing about the state where you're ejecting crawlingly diseased mucus out of every orifice that isn't several hundred percent better better with a healthy shot of alcohol.

That is all.
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Things to Stick on Bread 2: Peanut Butter and Banana

- Take two slices of packaged Granary bread. Lightly toast em.
- Butter em with salted butter.
- Slather on a good thick layer of CRUNCHY peanut butter.
- Then (and this is the clever bit) sprinkle on a good big pinch of Herbs de Provence.

There are, of course, several things you can do with the banana - but if you expect such an obvious gag from me then you little know your man. And you should be thoroughly ashamed of yourself.

- Slice up a banana. Ideally, said banana should be ripe to the point of mushy. Arrange on top of the slices.

At this point, a lesser bunny would be done … but oh no, not you, you're a better bunny than that! And don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

- Repair to your big frying pan or skillet. Heave in the slices (peanut butter and banana side up, idiot) and briefly fry up the undersides in HOT sunflower oil.
- Decant on plate. Mash the two slices together to make a sammich. Cut in half, and lightly dust with icing sugar.

Then you're done. And you're quite, quite welcome.
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Things to Stick on Bread 1: Roquefort and Grape

Good thick slice of crusty Ciabatta or sourdough and add:

- Thin spread of Normandy butter
- Thick spread of Roquefort
- Grind of black pepper
- Sliced, seedless rosé grapes

Made of yum. That is all.
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SelaFane 1: An Unpleasant Opening

Joey Malish woke, at four forty-five of a Saturday morning, on the unprepossessing cold tile floor of a ground floor bar of the Swiss Cottage Holiday Inn.

(And those of a sensitive and not to say somnolent nature - it is, after all, far too early for this unpleasantness - would be well advised to skip over this chapter entirely and pass on to the next … which starts at a far more reasonable hour, contains far more likeable people and has some hot lesbo action thrown in to boot.)

Woke as though surfacing from surgical anaesthetic: simply and suddenly there and functioning on some refrigerated and disassociated level, as though the brain has been excised and lightly chilled and slopped on a slab, the essential vestiges of self shrivelled and atrophied and unable to connect.

A cleaner was prodding at him with the business end of an Addis.

Joey gazed up, numbly, at the rayon-clad vision of loveliness, unable to move, and tried to pull some sort of sense out of echo-chamber stimuli dragged through ears seemingly stuffed with ether-permeated cotton wadding.

The grey and parboiled-looking, wrinkle-edged lips stopped moving, and shut as though pulled tight by a drawstring. Evidently some sort of salient response was called for at this point.

‘Glurk,’ said Joseph Peter Malish. ‘Glub-flubber grag fug blerk.’

* * *

Reception was deserted, the lobby dimly lit on night light. Joey headed vaguely for the toilets: there to partake of the waters of life and do unlikely things with liquid soap.

In the mirror-tile, under yellow-filtered fluorescents, something thin and pale and twenty-five:

- Ratty mouse-brown hair in which the abortive peroxidal experimentation had almost grown out.
- Scuffed biker leather over stretch-mesh lycra clotted with a stratal crust of various semi-potable residues.
- Heavy-lidded mud-grey eyes, underblotched with incipient low-grade toxicosis and a sparse four-day growth.

This elegant and debonair figure was only slightly marred by the fact that some kind soul had seen fit to inscribe the word TNUC, in mirror writing, upon the forehead, with magic marker. There had been some small lapse of concentration with the N, and only this appeared to be reversed.

Joey regarded his reflection impassively for a while, and then repaired to a sink and a soap dispenser to scrub vigorously at his forehead with the heel of his hand.

Now, it is not the purpose of this narrative to burden the world with yet another gritty exposé of the strange and murky world of the incredibly hung-over alcohol abuser … not alcoholic, you understand, which is another thing entirely.

Then again of course, the only carefully considered and reasonable response to those who wilfully go around pointing out and actually discoursing ad infinitum upon such cliché is, of course: fuck off you smug bog-postmodernist bastard and learn how to make things up for a change.

Anyhow. For our purposes, the salient point is that in such a state certain bodily functions tend to go dormant, waiting to be jump-started as it were by the pulse-acceleration and endocrinic shift of some sudden exertion.

One might, for example, be industriously scrubbing at one’s forehead with the heel of a hand, when one experiences the overwhelming urge, so one thinks, to expel a sudden and particularly extensive lower bowelful of wind.

All in all, it was the end of a perfect night.

* * *

In a cubicle that had suddenly assumed the olfactory aspect of a wire-guided Irish pub taking out a sewerage plant, Joey dropped his ruined Jockey shorts into the bowl and scrubbed at the inside of his jeans. Mercifully, the underwear had taken the initial brunt.

He stuck a hand through the hole in the pocket of his jacket and fished out the small plastic bottle lodged in the lining: massage oil infused with rose and ylang-ylang. Gorgeous.

Then again, it was either that or the poppers - and the possible epidermal effects of a vial bearing the kind of biohazard warnings ordinarily associated with a biochemical warfare lab didn’t bear thinking about.

Balmed and perfumed with the oils of the Orient, he left the rest room and sauntered out through the lobby.

A recently-materialised night porter followed his progress with glowering suspicion; probably, Joey thought, uneasily, pegging him as Rent … an uncharitable estimation that would, in fact, upon subsequent investigation of the toilets, be revised upward to rent and into seriously autoerotic scat as a sideline.

Out on the street now, and heading in what he hoped to God was the direction of a southerly-travelling night bus, hunched and shivering in his jacket against the wind and with the icy cold lancing upward through Air Wair soles worn membrane-thin.

A single clear memory surfaced from the megrimous chaos of the night. Rian looking down at him: ‘Jesus, will you look at yourself? You’re pissing away your entire fucking life.’

Joey squashed it flat and stuck a couple of fingers in a pocket to find the crushed and slightly damp remains of a cigarette.

Off to the left a multiplex cinema lay dark and dormant, waiting to lure the unwary the dubious pleasures of Shatterlands, Violator IV (With All-New Strap-on Weapons Attachment!) and Razorbill.

Off to the right (and which was sodding typical in that it meant he was walking in the wrong direction entirely) the sky grimly lightened towards dawn. Something vaguely avine shrittered and chirruped nearby, disturbed by his passing.

‘Tweet fucking tweet,’ said Joey.

NEXT: Hot Lesbo Action

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