By Sam Smith
Published: February 21, 2008
Updated: October 27, 2008 PrintEmail
11) Money
This Thursday, this early, the hard lacquered cow is behind the desk in the massage parlour. (It's called a 'massage parlour', but he is a practical man, knows that it's really only a shop with its front window bricked up and its length divided into cubicles. The low background music is to disguise the rattle of the air extractors.)
"Full body massage," he pays his twenty quid out here in the foyer with its furniture polish smell of suburbia.
He was working all last weekend, and all this week. Fourteen hour shifts. Cash in hand. He's seen only a few women in those many hours. And with every one of those women he has been aware that she has been naked under her clothes, that all that any of their clothes did was to emphasise her nakedness.
This overweight 'manageress' makes a show of looking through the appointments ledger. Beneath her tailored tunic top are white rolls of belly fat.
Artfully arranged on the partition wall behind her are photographs of the masseurs with smiling clients, all white-faced snapshots taken here in the foyer with a flash. The paintwork gleams in those photographs, the men's round faces shine, the girls are all hair and make-up. He doesn't recognise any of them.
"If you would take a seat, Sir, someone will be with you in a moment."
Not a hint, not a glimmer does this fat cow give that she knows what goes on back there on the hard black rubber beds. He despises her. She is of no use to him and all that he wants from any woman now is a screw.
Finishing work tonight, to get it done with and out of the way, he prescribed for himself a visit here, lest his daylong edginess around women interfere with his drinking. Because tonight is his. A piece of time all his own. And what better to start it with than a piece of ass all his own?
His massage money paid, a tall blonde girl he hasn't seen before shows him into the second cubicle from the end. This early in the evening the place seems empty.
"If you would undress and wrap that towel round your middle," she says in her best posh voice, "one of our trained staff will be with you shortly."
All of them go on as if they didn't know what is really happening here. The pretence alternately pleases and angers him. The dishonesty and deceit angers him; while the success and seriousness of the charade pleases him, because it means that they're playing safe and they'll be here for him next week; and this is a fucking sight easier and cheaper than having to chat up some silly tart, spend a fortune on funny drinks, try not to insult her; and then have her shouting at him in the morning. (He has never sought or thought of anything more than a night with a woman. Love's a joke, he early decided. We all die alone, so fuck making deals just for a little bit of company in our soft-brained old age.)
The black rubber bed has blue tissue paper laid end to end over it. He undresses completely. (He showered before coming). The crisp white towel wrapped around him, he lays back on the soft blue tissue paper.
The dark-haired girl from last time comes in and drops the latch on the door. The red engaged sign will now be showing outside.
"And what would you like Sir?" She has a thick waist and big tits. Like the tall blonde one she is wearing a white tunic and dark blue trousers.
"Same as last time."
"And what was last time?" she oils her hands and smoothes them over his chest.
"You on top."
"Are you sure Sir?"
"Cut the crap. Money's over there."
She begins to rhythmically knead the muscles on either side of his neck. He looks at her face. The nose seems to descend in a straight line from her square white forehead. The rest of her face is small and happens in the shade of those horizontal eyebrows.
"You the drummer?" she moves her hands up over his shoulder and under his back, so that her face is closer. Her breath is warm and moist on his cheek. She presses into the two knotty muscles between his shoulder blades.
"Was," he says
"Fifteen again?"
"Was ten last time."
He makes as if to get up. She brings her hands back up around to his chest and flattens her palms, leans her weight on him,
"Inflation."
She lets him raise himself partly up, rumpling the blue tissue paper. Her smile assumes he's going to reach for his trousers to get the extra fiver. She reaches down to the towel. She is pretty when she smiles. He doesn't want her to be pretty.
"Ten," he says.
"Meany," she pouts as she removes the towel. The pout makes him think she means to get away with a blow-job.
"You on top," he tells her.
She glumly, resigned to taking off some clothes, nods. Stepping backwards out of her sandals, she drops her blue trousers and pushes down her green and white knickers. Her thick white knee presses into his side as she climbs up onto the iron-legged bed and straddles him. She watches his face as she grips his erection before pushing it up between her legs. He feels her cunt's welcome warmness, his erection being where it wants to be. He makes no movement.
She presses her hips hard down upon him, lifts off, and presses right the way down to the speckled base of his prick — to make him cum quickly. A whore's trick. Time's money. He wants her to not move so fast, to make it last longer.
"Undo your top."
"Fifteen," she says.
"Fifteen," he agrees.
She unzips her white tunic. The big white tits with their dark nipples spill out. She watches his face, moves her hips faster. His abdomen feels hot. He reaches up to hold the tits. The whole of his being is instead focused on six inches of engorged gristle. His eyes go wide, his face goes red, and — staring at the ceiling — he cums.
His arms drop by his sides. She climbs off and goes to the sink in the corner. He listens to her splashing. Now he hates her for her instant indifference to him.
"The money?" she says. She is dressed and done up right down to her sandals: no-one would think she had a body.
"In my trousers. I'll get it."
He rolls off the hard rubber bed and goes, bare white feet flapping, to the sink. She steps out of his way, gathers up the torn and scrunched up blue tissue paper and drops it in a plastic bin. He rinses off his limp dick. It doesn't feel as if it's had a bit, no sense of weighty achievement.
She waits, standing at the end of the massage bench, while he dresses. Only when his shirt is tucked in and his fly zipped does he put his hand in his pocket and pull out his roll of notes.
"Here you go," he tosses two fivers onto the black rubber.
"You're a note short." She doesn't attempt to touch the money.
"That's all you're worth."
"Don't bother coming back here." She still hasn't moved.
"I'll be back," he lets himself out.
Her non-reaction was as much a disappointment as the fuck.
One woman he'd shortchanged in Bristol had come at him all teeth, tits and flying hair. Fighting her off had been as much fun as fucking her. She'd had bare arms too, as slender as an Indian temple dancer's.... This square lumpy cow had been altogether about as exciting as flat cider. Thinking of which....
commentary.... This man, drummer, is possibly an amalgam. Or, possibly, he is an accurate representation of the real man, but compiled from unconscious signals, subliminal mutterings, that I picked up later. Or was it simply something half-said, half-heard, half-seen; a half-remembering of another part-met man? Or was it, later that night, a glass and ashtray finger flourish subconsciously registered that had me make him here a drummer?
That said, this drummer, as will become evident, had no dreams nor ideals. (I have heard other men, like him, brag of visits to massage parlours.) If asked, this drummer would have said, with an air of sour cynicism, that he had no dreams or ideals left him. But, truth be told, he hadn't any to start with.
I am going to write of him as if I knew him.
This drummer grew up in a rowdy household convinced that neither of his parents liked him. Not that he took it personally: his parents hadn't liked anyone else either.
He was convinced that everyone and everybody had lied to him. As, for instance, all his teachers had lied to him. What about? The worth of his education.
To not get bogged down in details, the outcome of his whole childhood was that the adult world had put no love into him, no compassion. Nor had he been given any examples of selflessness that hadn't reeked of conceit. Aware of this loss to himself, he had tried to rectify this poverty of emotions in his adolescence, had tested out emotions on himself like a girl in a chemist spraying perfume on her wrists. (The only emotion he hadn't had to teach himself had been fear. A beneficial counter to that was that he knew when and where he felt safe.)
By the time he was twenty he had taught himself — by trial and error — love, compassion, sympathy and sentiment. And the lessons self-consciously learnt, he had found that he hadn't been able to use them, because, having all been learnt, all four had felt false. ('Love' continues to be a word used to describe a variety of wants and needs.) So, when later those emotions temporarily took him over, and had his eyes filling because of some manufactured happy-ever-after, he felt instantly false, and this person acting in this manner was not his real self.
Thus, a reflection of himself, had he come to perceive the rest of the world as being about as sincere as a chorus girl's smile. Which about summed up his attitude to sex — the chorus girl's smile being an offer of sex which she had no intention of fulfilling. All such trappings of sex he saw as a fraud. (Air women's skirts on a line and their gentle waftings are as mysterious as when they are moved by the living limbs. Sexual fetishists are the most obvious victims of this fraud, always become fixated on articles of clothing.)
The drummer, distrusting all, came to listen only to his 'real self'. Thus had he become wholly reactive, a base creature satisfying his base needs and his addict's cravings. Every other ideal he had been presented with had proved unworthy; and his character was such that, those ideals having been shown to be false, he had not gone seeking new ones. Instead he had withdrawn further into himself with his self-mocking knowledge, wanting of the future only the prescribed response from the rest of humanity that would reinforce his comfortable cynicism.
True Stories
On a Saturday night in December 1988 21 year old Martyn Prowse hit a woman in the face because she spoke with a Scottish accent.
In April 1989 a brick was thrown through a double-glazed window of Mr C W Long's Durleigh Road house. £150 of damage was done.
On Tuesday 26th September 1989 fighting broke out between 25 youths in the Blue Boar pub in Penel Orlieu, Bridgwater. People connected with the fair were involved. The fighting spread from the Blue Boar into North street, where a £500 shop window, belonging to John Baker's, was smashed. There were no arrests.
In May 1990 Paul Joseph Chilcott, of Addacombe Avenue, Bridgwater, threw chips on the ground by Cornhill. A Special Police Constable asked him to pick them up. 20 year old Paul Joseph Chilcott refused. He then dropped a drinks carton to the ground. Sedgemoor Magistrates fined him £25 for depositing litter in a public place.
