Stumble

I got very drunk last night and decided to walk the long way home through Melbourne’s inner suburbs from the pub, during which I listened to Linkin Park's A Thousand Suns, which is not only one of the best albums ever made, but one that should only be listened to consecutively from start to finish, without interruption.  

It was around midnight and my walk was slowing down and I felt nauseous but invincible. As ‘Iridescent’ started to play I looked at some tattered bills posted on an old inner-suburban building contrasted with Melbourne’s blurred skyline and had a very real vision about Melbourne being in rubble and being unable to be rebuilt. I broke the rules this morning and re-listened to certain tracks from the album on my very hungover walk to my studio, but couldn’t really re-live the experience from the night before. I wanted it back, however. I wanted to be standing in rubble. Buzzed yet methodical. Stoic. Iridescent and insignificant. Iridignifescent.

What I got reminded of was somebody that I used to know. Somebody with whom I’ve had a complicated relationship. We went to university together, and I’d always thought she was fun and cute and I liked her style and I was fascinated by her love for fitness, which contrasted nicely with my love for drinking and smoking. She was great company. We hung out constantly as idiotic undergraduates but due to my cowardice, her aloofness, and our timing, the relationship never escalated. We ended up living in different cities after graduation, and stayed in light contact via Facebook and text message, but that was it. Her name was Clare.

Years later I was on leave in Melbourne and I read a Facebook post that she was in town for the weekend, which was a weekend that myself and some friends were due to spend in country Victoria drinking beer and being assholes. I sent her a text, and she ditched her friends and joined us. We made out in bed that night, but nothing more. It was nice.

We texted and sexted for a few weeks, which intensified into explicit, clinical descriptions of what we would do to one another. The depths of degradation to which she wanted to be subjected would seem limitless, before she’d switch instantly into dominant mode, wanting to tie me up in public, mash my balls with a hammer, murder me. It was fun. It was intense. And I was hooked, to the point where my big dumb dick made me fall a little in love. 

During this time of intensive sexting her company sent her to London for a six-month training course. She was isolated, and I was horny and in love, and for six long months my loins literally ached for her. I would go to sleep sending her explicit messages, dredging the very depths of degradation, and would wake up to her responding alike. We discovered Viber, which was a late-naughties means of sending short audio clips, and things went berserk. Sex with other girls during this time felt like cheating, and didn’t really compare to the scenarios that she would spool up in my head. Porn was boring. My cock constantly strained against my streaky underwear as I lost myself in the fantasy.

About months into this madness we decided that we needed to see each other so I, cock locked between my belt and my belly, booked flights to London, including a ridiculous five-star apartment overlooking Hyde Park. It was to be a whole week of crazy sex and playing house and roaming, hip to hip, through the Kingdoms. The sexting only intensified after the trip was booked. She told me she’d bought rope, toys, gallons of lube. The pending reality had me suddenly hyper-aware of my body, and I obsessively Googled different ways to overcome the less-alluring functions that may be encountered during a week of cohabitation. Most of the advice was along the lines of ‘everybody poops, get over it’, against which I, hackles raised, railed. I settled eventually on a combination of fasting, and a plan to attend a nearby gym (or, at least, its toilets) every day, to keep me as a lithe, functionless, God. I practiced urinating silently down my leg in the shower. I learned that Justin Timberlake ordered his dressing room to have charcoal tablets, and started eating them like tic-tacs.

We remained in constant contact up until the moment I had to power-down my device for take-off, with her telling me exactly where at Heathrow she would meet me, and exactly what she would do to keep me awake and alert through the jetlag. I nursed my aching hard-on throughout the flights.

After 28 hours I landed in London, and made a rush for the toilet. Using a combination of hand sanitiser, baby wipes, and toilet paper, I scraped and preened at my cursed undercarriage until not a hint of the flight was left. Immediately on exiting the bathroom I felt a shift in my bowel, and raced back to the cubicle. After an hour of purging, cleansing, sweating every ounce of nervous gas and excreta, followed by scouring anew with baby wipes and ethanol, finally I felt clear enough to engage customs. I had sweat through my shirt with how late my wanton bowel had made me, but my anxiety was for naught. After finally connecting to the Airport’s Wi-Fi after an age in customs, I learned that she was not coming, having elected instead to have dinner with a friend that allegedly needed company. Hurt, exhausted, stinking, stinging, I hauled my disgusting form to the express.

Days dragged. I’d spent all of my money on the flights, and on the luxury serviced apartment in which I rattled, rejected, alone. Excuse followed excuse. Work. Family. Headache. “Can we just meet though? Coffee?” came my urgent, whining SMS messages, only to be rebuked with increasing shortness for my pathetic clinging. But she was the sole reason I was there. I didn’t care for the sights. I couldn’t afford to travel further, and to return home was to accept the hopelessness of the situation. What if she came around? Decided as I was boarding the plane home that she wanted me after all. The slight chance to stand awed at her naked form kept me from fleeing, as I should have.

See, man is a persistence hunter. I am no different from the Kalahari bushman, tracking the mighty Kudo across the scorching desert sands of Botswana until it lays, cowed and beaten, eyes wide as it awaits the bushman’s spear to plunge into its flank. And here I sat, barely eating, waiting for my mighty Kudo to feel something; a pang of yearning, a hint of curiosity. Guilt. Pity. Anything that might lead to us meeting.

On the morning of my last full day in London the bushman’s persistence paid off. She sent a contrite text message, piling on excuse after excuse, hoping I’d had a good time in London anyway, and offering a quick coffee before I left. I asked her to meet me at my hotel. She stalled, bargained, claimed it was “kinda a hike” from her apartment, then eventually capitulated.

An age of shitting and scouring and pruning and scrubbing followed. I was the graceful God again, scented and collected, postured and pruned. Finally.

We met in the hotel lobby. She was scrubbed, red faced, wet hair pulled tightly back into a bun. Skintight jeans. Woollen jumper. I met her in the foyer. We hugged. I invited her to my room. She agreed.

While waiting for the elevator I pushed her against the wall and kissed her hard, half expecting a rejection, but having come too far not to risk it. She wrapped her legs around my waist and kissed me back, and we remained like that the entire way up to the room. I took her immediately to the bed and started to take her clothes off, but she stopped me and said she was having her period. But the mighty kudo does bleed. The bushman needs to eat. I articulated this as sexily as I could. She wasn’t sure. I shrugged and produced a bottle of massage oil, and her face lit up. She lay on her stomach wearing just her jeans and a bra.

I had my iPhone docked in the hotel’s bedside stereo, and I straddled her butt and reached over to put on Linkin Park's A Thousand Suns. The opening, haunting piano of ’The Requiem’ played, and I unclipped her bra and started rubbing oil into her beautiful back. We didn’t talk, but just kind of rocked with each other, listening to the music as I rubbed in the oil. I started massaging lower and lower, and asked if I could take off her jeans, at which she nodded. I peeled them off her legs, and resumed my massage of her lower back. I ran a finger around the waistline of her underwear and suggested we put a towel down. She again nodded, and I retrieved one from the linen cupboard while she went to the bathroom to do whatever witchcraft it is girls do before sex. 

I know this all sounds very clinical and a bit sad, and I guess it was. She was inexperienced and shy, and I had this dumb notion that sex would fix whatever crumbling disaster of a relationship we had, but it was bad. It was boring. In the text-based fantasies we conjured up we were sleek, hairless, like seals twisting together as they frolicked, sleek and graceful. In reality she mauled my neck. I was mechanical. If she came it was feeble, and I only came because, as we later discovered, the condom broke. We lay there together, me still inside her, and kissed. I went to withdraw and she grabbed me with her hands and legs and drew me back in and said to stay where I was for a bit. We were locked like that, silently breathing each other’s air, when 'Iridescent’ came on. I sadly waited until that beautiful song finished before slowly removing myself from her. We showered in turn, then spent a miserable day in London together. She returned home that afternoon, and I spent another night alone.