of the ocean pounding in my ears and a vast expanse of thin cloud undulating in a darkening sky.
My cries disturbed some sea birds that had nested down for the night and many screeched angrily as they wheeled up towards the blackening horizon. Dudley was sucking my clit and working two fingers in and out of my hole. I wanted to feel the weight of his body pressing down against me, so I grabbed his ears and yanked hard. Dudley buried himself inside me. I could taste my love juice on his lips as they pressed against mine. Both Dudley and I were going crazy, shattering the peace of the night with our cries. Somehow I managed to tell Dudley not to come inside me. He kept fucking me, slowing down every now and then, until eventually he had to withdraw. I pushed Dudley onto his back, his jeans were still around his ankles, so I knelt to one side of him and ran my tongue up and down his dick. I’d enjoyed gazing up at the clouds, but I could see Dudley was staring at my arse, which was sticking up in the air.
Holding the base of Dudley’s erection with my index finger and thumb, I took his fuck stick in my mouth. Having lubricated him with my saliva, I got a tad cruel. I clenched my teeth and ran them up and down his meat. Dudley squirmed beneath me, unsure about where to draw the dividing line between pleasure and pain. I repeated this trick several times, until the ventriloquist’s dummy began screaming my name. Rolling it back and forth on his tongue. Anna. Anna. It was the same whichever way you said it. Backwards. Forwards. Anagramatised. Noon. Noon. I took one of Dudley’s balls in my mouth and nipped playfully at the sack that contained them. A few minutes later I returned my attention to the dummy’s shaft. It wasn’t hard to get him to come in my mouth. My goal achieved, I French-kissed Alan’s double. This gave me ample opportunity to spit the huge wad of spunk I’d extracted from Dudley into his mouth. I kept him pinned down until he’d swallowed it.
After that we just lay together on the beach for a very long time. We didn’t think of taking a shower before we went to bed, we just wanted to collapse. We had sand all over us and after a bit more shagging, the bed was really gritty. We fucked some more in the tangled sheets when we woke. Then we headed for Saffron Walden. After parking the car we made our way into Bridge End Gardens. There was bird shit all over the benches in the park. Having squeezed through a piece of broken fence, we entered the Bridge End hedge maze from the east side. It took a lot of twisting and turning before we found our way to the centre. The statues and other monuments that originally decorated the maze had been removed. We made love at the goal and at this point I woke.
TWO
I AWOKE suddenly from the dark pool of sleep, Alan was already stirring, slipping out from between my floral duvet and a white sheet. It took me a while to remember who Alan was. I could hear him pissing into the toilet as I put the events of the previous day into place. When Alan re-entered my bedsit I laughed because he hadn’t dressed and I knew that would have given the nymphomaniac who lived opposite me quite a thrill if she’d run into him on the stairs. Then I saw Hannah, my sex-mad neighbour, following Alan through the door. Hannah liked group sex and when she brought a bloke home who I found attractive it wasn’t unknown for me to join in.
Alan stood above me grinning. Hannah embraced him from behind. Her hands snaked around his torso and she stroked his cock into an erection, then held it tightly. Hannah put the index finger of her free hand into her mouth and proceeded to massage saliva into Alan’s left nipple. He squirmed with pleasure. I sat up and took Alan’s cock in my mouth. Hannah sank to her knees and began to rim him. As I lubricated the length, I could feel myself getting all wet. I got onto my knees and turned around, so that Alan could enter me from behind, standing up. Hannah removed her skirt and panties, then climbed onto the bed. She pushed my head down against the mattress and clambered onto my back, lying with her back against my back and her legs swung over Alan’s shoulders.
I couldn’t see anything, my eyes were closed but I knew from the sounds and movement of our bodies that Alan was licking Hannah out as he gave me a shafting. I came as Alan shot his load into my hole and from the way she screamed, I knew an orgasm had washed through Hannah’s body too. There was a tangle of limbs and Hannah struggled up. Told us she had to rush or she’d be late for work. Alan crawled into bed beside me and we slept for the best part of two hours. We made love when we woke up. The missionary position, nothing exotic. Eventually we dressed. I was out of milk so we went to Carmine’s on Union Terrace for an early lunch. Over pasta and cappuccinos we discussed literature.
Alan commented on my collection of Kathy Acker’s work – Great Expectation, Blood and Guts in High School, Don Quixote, Literal Madness, Empire of the Senseless, Portrait of an Eye, In Memoriam to Identity, My Mother: Demonology, Hannibal Lecter My Father, Bodies of Work, Eurydice in the Underworld and Pussy, King of the Pirates. Alan admired Kathy Acker but said he could never read through to the end of her books. He was surprised when I told him I just read passages at random, it made no sense to read Kathy Acker from beginning to end. At some point Alan told me that in her essays Acker fell behind the premises from which she started out in her fiction. I told Alan he didn’t know how to read. Imagine starting on page one with a book and then proceeding through to the end.
I’d heard stories about a number of the male writers Kathy lived with at varying times in her life. They tended to be less talented and less successful than Acker. It is alleged that one of these writers convinced himself that he was Kathy Acker while she was away on a promotional tour. When Kathy returned home, the young writer was unable to sustain the fantasy that he was a successful novelist and suffered a nervous breakdown. Alan didn’t think the story was true. It sounded suspiciously as if it was a fragment culled from a post-modern novel. Besides, Kathy was too cryptic to be involved in something so obvious. He began talking about Michael Bracewell, who I’d always thought of as a journalist. Alan produced three Bracewell novels from his bag. He told me Kathy Acker discovered Bracewell and took him to Serpent’s Tail, who published his first book.
Alan explained that Bracewell was one of the first style or club novelists, an achievement that should be placed in the context of the long history of fiction aimed at teenagers. I still have three of Alan’s Bracewell books and by looking through them I’ve been trying to piece together what he said over pasta at Carmine’s. You can see from the books that Bracewell learnt to write as he went along. The prose style in The Crypto-Amnesia Club and Missing Margate, both dating from 1988, is quite atrocious. By the time Saint Rachel was published in 1995, Bracewell was producing chiselled prose in the mould of Aldous Huxley or Evelyn Waugh. Regardless of whether one likes the traditional English novel, it is still possible to appreciate the way Bracewell transformed himself into a prose stylist.
It is difficult to imagine Kathy Acker liking Saint Rachel, although Lynne Tillman admires it. Kathy would have liked everything bad about Bracewell. The flash. The coy iconoclasm of Missing Margate, which becomes a gender-bender novel when read alongside The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. The way in which Bracewell’s nostalgia for an England that never was allowed him to be seduced by everything post-modern. Those are the things Acker would have liked about Bracewell. Alan made the point that Bracewell’s tragedy was that he’d learnt to write. The future was always leaking back and influencing the past. Having written competent works, Bracewell could never operate beneath the threshold of critical opinion.
The 80s ended in economic depression and while Bracewell’s early work was marketed as satire, it was ultimately a celebration of middle-class consumerism. Everything had gone wrong and as Saint Rachel documented, it ended in Prozac. Bracewell’s flaw was being more intelligent than Cyril Connolly. He knew from the beginning that he was a bad patriot, that the England he lusted after never had and never would exist. Bracewell was fixated on Englishness but his works described a different country from the land inhabited by the working-class heroes celebrated in best-selling books like England Away by John King. Bracewell came from Sutton and he overcame this lower-middle-class environment through celebrations of upward mobility.
In
