and, as the rapist says how tight he is, he realises the cancer’s back; it will be a jeering portal into a new dimension of Desperate Iniquity.
Well, I suppose, to be entirely accurate, I sent HarperCollins the outline of a crime porno and they told me to fuck off. Instead, they asked me to produce what you hold in your hands. I was asked to deliver a humorous topical Christmas book, the sort of thing that raises a wry eyebrow at the news. A Jeremy Clarkson-style slab of bouncy opinion that, with the right cover, might sell well in train stations.
However, they did say that the introduction wasn’t too important and I could maybe let loose a little there. Most people skip the introduction, and half the people who get a book in a train station never read the fucking thing. So for the rest of the introduction I want you to imagine that you’re reading a crime novel. A crime novel in which many of the leads the investigator pursues seem to end in almost pointlessly graphic sex scenes.
• • •
The taxi pulls up by a little boxy end of terrace. After this, it’s all just countryside; after the street lamp on the corner, there’s nothing. I pay the cabbie and get out with her. She turns round as if suddenly aware of the impropriety, silhouetted with her deelie-boppers in the dusk, more like a stag at bay than a hen returning from her own hen night. There’s a long, awkward pause.
I find myself thinking that seduction is just being able to think of something to say at a moment like this. Something that isn’t a terrifying indication of how badly you want to fuck. I can’t think of anything.
I grip her firmly by the back of the neck and her mouth opens slowly under mine. She pulls my bottom lip gently between her teeth, then breaks off and walks abruptly up to the door.
‘Night, night!’ she laughs, way too loud, and I wonder if she might be drunk after all. I’ve followed her step for step and when she twists to say goodbye to me at the door I’m actually right behind her, kissing down hard on the back of her neck, her shoulder.
‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ she chides, turning in my arms to push her mouth into my chest at the open top button of my shirt. I’m holding her by her hip under her jacket and I push my fingers up inside her T-shirt to her bra, her nipple stiffening under my hand. She runs her hand down my chest till she reaches my belt, then, thank fuck, down to where my hard-on is straining through my trousers.
‘I can’t. My fiancé’s inside . . .’
Oh, fuck.
‘He’ll be waiting up for me,’ she declares in a stage whisper, looking off towards the road with a flicker of annoyance crossing her face.
Part of me knows that the moment has passed but then a wee voice in me thinks that if it had passed she’d be gone. I kiss her hard on the lips and I can see the surprise in her eyes as I lift her up with a soft thump against the door, her head bumping gently against the little square of dimpled glass at the top, and I start pushing her skirt up. I keep expecting her to tell me to stop but it doesn’t come, and I just keep pushing. She’s running her tongue along my top lip as my fingers reach the top of her knickers, I tug at her tights, and everything just slides over her little bum surprisingly easily.
A light comes on in the house. Not the hall but back in there somewhere. I’m expecting ‘We shouldn’t be doing this . . .’ at any moment, but I’ve got my cock out now and as I push up against her I suddenly have her full attention again. I’ve got my hand on my cock and I’m trying to guide it in, she’s looking out to the road anxiously, which is odd when we can hear her fiancé moving about inside, but she’s slippery to the touch, and just by pushing up from my legs I’m suddenly in her and she’s biting into my shoulder as her deelie boppers start to rattle gently against the door.
I’m slipping it in and out of her, up through the bustle of her skirt, going as slowly as I can bear. The cold on the outstroke makes me aware of how wet my dick is getting between her legs. Suddenly the light goes on in her hall and I can hear someone shouting, indistinctly, like they’re way back at the far end. Maybe her fiancé thinks she’s just pissed and trying to find her keys, or . . . fuck it, who cares, I’m sick of worrying about other people. I can hear him in there, like he’s moving towards the door, maybe just trying to work out what’s going on. He says something, he’s quite close now, but he sounds drunk and I can’t make it out, and I’m fucking busy here, to be honest.
The shouting gets louder, he sounds drunk or something, an unhappy blah blah blah. She looks back anxiously and then wraps her legs round me really tight, suddenly moving up higher. I’m just holding her now and she’s lost it, pumping her hips like a fucking jockey or something. I hear footsteps coming down the hall but it’s too late because she’s coming hard all over my dick, a gasp of warm breath steams up my glasses and her unmistakable loud moan breaks the silence of the night. This gets me right there and, as I start to shoot, I force open the letterbox awkwardly with my fingers and blast a load into their hallway.
There we are. That degeneracy should have seen everybody off. It’s just you and me now; nobody else will have managed to get to the end of that bit. I don’t think I’ve ever read it all the way through myself. Listen, while nobody’s looking I’m going to try to explain all of human relations as quickly as possible. I imagine that you’re quite young and idealistic – persevering with that porno and thinking that I’d a point to make. Well, if you could do something about what I’m about to say to you later in life, change the world, sort everything out, much appreciated. The question, obviously, is why I chose to include the sex scene. That, I think, is for the reader to work out, and then tell me.
We’ve a bit of a hangover from earlier times. People think of themselves as a ‘self’, a conscious being. In our modern market-driven society the ‘self’ is no longer the ego. It’s our brand identity. Most of what we do is not to serve our ego, our own idea of ourselves, but actually to serve our status, other people’s idea of ourselves.
We’re the first completely market-oriented generation in history and it has destroyed our ability to be free and conscious. We’re not the people we pretend to be. If I invented a time machine, I’d like to think that my first trip would be to go back and kill Hitler. In reality, I’d use the first trip to kill Piers Morgan’s mother at the moment of his conception, and the second one to go back and check.
I remember even as a kid scouring those little brochures you’d get from Woolworths for my parents’ Christmas presents. Like you, I moved on to express myself through the charities I supported, the bands I was into, even the people I hung around with. Around me grew a society where people would turn up for the half hour of adverts before a film and never complain, where we tried to express our individuality through the purchase of mass-produced goods. Even my favourite comedian, Bill Hicks, was peddling that ‘individuality through smoking’ thing. That was just an angle thought up by ad men decades earlier. People started to speak of the ads being better than the TV shows, somehow believing against all the evidence that the TV shows were the principal content and the adverts incidental. Now we understand that everything is to be marketed, even art.
I read the comic-book writer Alan Moore describe art as ‘propaganda for a state of mind’. Who do we create propaganda for? Our equals? No, for the easily manipulated, for those we have contempt for. So to be an artist in the wholly marketed society is to have contempt for everyone. You propagandise for your state of mind to others – and it’s not even your state of mind. It’s the off-the-peg set of opinions you got from the part of the culture you tried to buy into, from a set of people who were propagandising to you. They’re not even your ideas. They weren’t even theirs.
Of course,
