Coakes wanders Macy’s with his miss, dollybird keen at his side. She races off, grabs peagreen dresses, holds them up for his inspection. He displays beneficence, nods quiescence to one superfluous purchase after another. “Twirl”, he says, and “Excellent.”
His bit of rough is peachy, a fine dark after dinner mint. The first meathole in years that Coakes has used and not immediately cast off. Her name is Juliet. She is Hispanic, Coakes’ favourite vaginal ethnicity. She displays the quick temper and inconstant affections of her kind. Yet yields acceptably at the mere threat of his hand. Next to Juliet, Coakes is calm. He feels an odd stability. Protective even. The girl’s so slight, wicked gorgeous beneath rebel curls. He wants her next to him as he pulls tight turns in an Aston Martin over Tuscany. He wants her sunning on his deck as they power through the last leg of the Americas Cup. He wants to buy her things, twinkly treaclish things that chicks dig. Sure, he’s had to pull some strings to reel her in. But, for this moment, Coakes is whole.
In lingerie Coakes picks out panties and a peephole bra. Juliet dons them double quick, and opening the change rooms slatted door, motions him inside. In the tight mirrored confines of the changing room, Coakes is swollen and fidgety. Juliet fingers his shirt buttons and kisses him. Not on the cock, nowhere near the fetid dumpster of his arsehole. Not even on the milkdud of his furred and cankered outey. But on the lips, soft, delicate, child like. Coakes pulls back, scandalised.
“Hush”, she tells him, kicking off her sandals to stand on his feet. Coakes lifts the girl once, twice. Clumsy steps. Walks her to the corner, hoists her effortlessly to his waist. Juliet runs a hand through the grease lump of his hair, wipes a fleck of spittle from his open lips. Coakes tenses for a kiss that never comes. Opens his eyes. Juliet just looks at him. Right at his grim wide jaw. Right at his thin broken nose. Right at his blood shot, fur browed eyes. Reaching down, popping his belt, she holds his tiny crooked dick. Coakes begin to shake. Right then, a voice. “Excuse me sir, you can’t be in here. There’s no canoodling in the changerooms.”
Coakes drops the girl, turns, cock out of course. Juliet slips free, away giggling into the store. Coakes is alone with a black. A stout white haired woman, mid forties, fingering a belt of police tools. Sprays, cuffs, batons.
“Put it away sir.”
Coakes begins to lose control. Raising his fists, he begins to slap, fishlike at the guard. His wrists are limp, and his cock, still public, leaps and twitches with each blow. Over the tanoy, some rogue shop minion has snuck a knife track on the playlist. And Coakes can see all the little balls rolling down the hill, myriad colours. Pepper spray in his eyes. A world in red and blue. Promises made and broken. The floor rises up, cold and familiar, hard and heavy from below.

It’s hot. I’m sweating. It’s doing its usual trick, pooling in the pit of my lower back, burning the cracked psoriasis skin there. I shift my weight onto the other foot, the brown moleskin loafer lets out a low grown as the rubber twists. Melody, the ungrateful, looks up from her New Yorker. There. Her usual wrinkle nosed fear as she weights for the bombardment of airborne faecal matter. But not this time, it’s just the shoes.

I smile, and pat her on the shoulder roughly, unfamiliarly, her eyes widen. She takes a sharp breath.
“I’m sorry Dad, it’s just that..” She looks down at her feet. Her sequin sown Harriet the Spy sandals. I stare back at the road, concentrating. Roughly perhaps, I grab her hand, and yelling “Now”, rush out into the traffic, dragging her across the road.

In Macy’s, I have to buy some new shirts. There are too many stains on my old ones, ketchup mostly, and we’re getting into award season. The roof is low and ribbed above us. The metallic hum of the strip lights, the fans, and the giant freeze room where you test the latest slope fashions, deafen the piped muzak. Stretched back far as a football pitch are racks of clothing, colour coded, with pants and shirts and ties of every hew bunched together, an unwound rainbow.

“So, what colours do you like?”
I look down the rails and squeeze my shoes again, another loud rasp. I flash teeth at Melody, and for a second she smiles back. Cunt. She looks so much like her mother.
“I like purple, gold, imperial colours.” My voice squeaks high and girlish. This time she laughed.
“Don’t be silly dad, come on, lets get you some vertical stripes. Independent Woman Magazine says that vertical stripes flatter the larger gent. The latest research on optical illusions seems to back it up. American Scientist, the research magazine of Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society published a paper in June..”
She continues on like this as we trundle down endless rows of clothing. I grab shirts and ties at her suggestion, tossing them into the cart. Occasionally I nod, every now and then smile. She tugs my sleeve. I reach out and grab something off the rack, in my hand a crotchless pant. Her voice breaks through, nervous, desperate. We’re in the lingerie department.
“Dad, do you really wear those?” I want to rake the smirk from that smug little whitehead. My bumbles are not for her amusement. They’re for clever men in lab coats to note down, and record my precious spooneristic wit. I take a moment, like Baseman always says, this is quality time.
“No sweetie. They’re for you. For all your help.” I hold them out, “Give them a sniff. What do you think, will they fit?. Are they clean?” I ruffle the pants in my hand, inspecting. “Some nasty ladies try them on in store, leave their filthy pubes all over them.” I’m panting now, anxious. Something’s wrong, she’s still not happy. Bitch.
“Perhaps not these, other ones.” I reach for her hand, her face is vacant, she’s gone somewhere. Bitches always get like this. I haul her deeper, shoving the cart in front of us in angry thrusts, grabbing fistfuls of early learning bras and French knickerbocker glories. Here we are at last, in corsets.
“Take a look at this…”
Time passes. I’m outside a cubical, eyeing up the piles of soiled, rejected pants, holding back heroically. Here she is, my princess. My voice is high and clear as I say.
“Boy do they fit. Look who’s growing up fast.”
I make her twirl for me, if I were pretty I’d twirl too. This is our finest moment together. I smile, not looking at her face. How fortunate she is to have a hip sweet daddy like me.

Melody cowered in a corner of the booth. Oh sweet Matilda Joslyn Gage, her father was a mental patient. He was in the middle of a florid breakdown. He wasn’t himself. It was much too cold in here. Melody was all goosebumps, the hair on the back of my neck marching in rows. Or maybe it was not the air conditioning. Maybe it was that gaze. Breath again, Melody forced herself to think, where was her shirt? Outside, not far from the cubicle door, Melody could her fathers deep and throaty breaths. Don’t let him in, she thought. Don’t let him come in again. They’d been having such fun together, picking his shirts. He’d listened. Where were her shoes? Where were her hello kitties? Where were her own damn pants.
“Come on, try another, fuckin’ choose!”
It wouldn’t be so bad, if he hadn’t made everyone in the department watch. If he hadn’t called out, ‘Look at them, bigger every day. Daddies little Paris Hilton’. Melody could smell her fathers BO, like a rancid public pool. Think, she told herself. This was one of those moments a well read girl was properly prepared for. As Greer said, ‘Catastrophe is the natural human environment, we are programmed for survival amid catastrophe.’ She could get through this.
“Don’t be such a feminist. Try on that nice lacy one again. I’ve think I’ve figured out this camera function. I just paw at the screen don’t I?”
Photo’s, the internet, her internship with Senator Obama. Melody hunkered down, peered into the next stall. A rotund woman smiled back, tying her shoes.
“Hello dear.”
“Hi.”
She swung in under, pulling herself along beside the woman.
“Oh hello dear. Nice to meet you.” The lady held out a large hand.
Melody shook, motioned ’shush’, and pulled herself into the next stall. Further away from her father.

Minutes have passed. I’m feeling lonely. Inconsiderate cunt. She can’t leave me here in the womans section, I’m a man. I have a penis. I check. Come on. I drum my head against the cubicle door. Come, the fuck, on.
“Are you nearly ready for you close up honey?”
Silence. I decide to play a trick.
“Melody,” I yell, and burst in, camera in hand. But the stall’s empty. “Melody!”
I feel like that fuck Nicholson in Shining. Is she hiding? There such a mound of corsets I can’t tell. I bend, paw and sniff through the heap. Christ she smells like her mother. Minutes later, maybe more. A firm hand on my shoulder.
“Sir, sir you can’t be here. What exactly are you doing?”
“Melody!”

And the wild regrets, and the bloody sweats,
None knew so well as I:
For he who lives more lives than one
More deaths than one must die

Wilde, Ballad of Reading Gaol

Coakes’ dreams were fitful. Images of left-wing American politicians, liberal loons like McCain, plagued him. They mixed with sea sick montages of the whores body twitching and succumbing to his saw. He’d always dreamt badly, but tonight his sleep was stalked by ghouls. When skin tore and he, weeping, groped her left leg off, the horrid thin dusky face of Hussein was there and he’d started in on that with the hack saw, till Obama screamed with Melodies voice, his breath stinking of the of cold oily cunt.

Coakes had never trusted women. Mostly, it was because of their poons. Deep red slits, snide second mouths, lurking terribly between their legs. They appeared so threatening, as if they might bite your hand off. Only a fool would put their dick in there.

He was too hot in the deep white bedding and tossed about, pushing the covers off, his naked body glistening with sweat. A deep earthy stain from unrestrained nocturnal flatulence had spread peanut brittle on the sodden linen. He awoke slowly, the horror thick within him.

Groggily Coakes looked about the room. He wasn’t sure where he was, and what the fuck was that? What Coakes on waking had presumed to be the laundry basket, had begun, by itself to move. Something like eyes, beady lumps staring up at him. He meant to scream, but his voice was a hiss, thin and high. He scrambled back, pushed himself into a crouch on the bed, ready to jump if it came at him. It was the girl, the dead whore back to kill him.

“Mr Coakes?”

He did scream then. It was real. He backed against the wall, away from the shuffling flesh pile.

“Mr Coakes are you OK? Would you like me to leave?”

Coakes nodded shakily, his mind performing athletics in which he lept off the bed and kicked the bitches head right off. That would be good. He’d killed her once, he could do it again. It wouldn’t work though. The whore was reanimated somehow, and would be harder to kill the second time, surely. His arms looked beefy and strong, rattling there by his sides, but Coakes hadn’t really seen her move, didn’t know her speed. She might be a sprightly Danny Boyle zombie, ready to jog him down, to puke acidic undead blood right in his eyes.

“Mr Coakes..?”

The bin thing shuffled forward on her hands, and Coakes finally recognised Maria, the housekeeper. He sat down hard on the mattress, stress and farts leaking out of him. “Oh…” His hands were shaking as he patted her on the head. “What the fuck are you doing in my bedroom?”
“You were screaming Mr Coakes… I thought you were in trouble.”
He inspected her, dressed only in a t-shirt, her stump flesh bare. She noticed his stare and pulled the Tee down. Coakes nodded to the door, and dutifully the girl began to shuffle out. He wanted to cry, and lay down till it passed. The thinnest stripe of sunlight had begun to struggle through the pale cheap curtains. He wouldn’t sleep again now. He stood, naked and damp with sweat, and passed into the bathroom. The housekeeper had levered herself onto the john and squatted, pissing. Dirty pink underwear bunched at her knees, just before the skin folded in on itself at the stumps. Coakes ignored her, waiting for the water to heat up, bollock naked. She opened her mouth to speak, thought better of it. Coakes stepped into the shower, and she flopped off the flushing bowl and shuffled out.

“Coffee and croissants. Fresh croissants!” Coakes shouted after her, soaping his balls, cold water searing away the night.

Coakes lay on the beach. The skin of his body was smooth and golden brown. The flaking near his preternaturally deep belly button had cleared up. His stomach, with it livid purple scar was flat and hard. His arms and shoulders were ripped, toned. His hair a streak of blonde to his shoulders, gathered in a tight tail, and the sun had bleached his eyes to a pale muddy blue. Which happens. In one hand, he held a piece of scrap metal, an old anchor, to be used as a dumbbell. The other types on the now scuffed, slightly yellowing mac.

Coakes loved the changes in himself. He could lift thing, and feel the burn in his various muscles. It felt manly. He prized this masculinization, having been unmanned by so many. His ex-wife and that fuckin’ vibrator, the whirl of an electric motor still retracted his balls. His daughter, more a father to herself than Coakes ever could be. Even the sweet dear waiter, played by Tom Conti, had dressed him in make up and played with his hair. Castration after castration. He understood Muscle Marys now, the most effeminate of men, rooting their self esteem in brutish physique. Brothers in arms.

He didn’t care, he felt healthy now. He had managed to push that whore from his head. He could maintain a hard, enough to weep whitewash of joy, without weeping from eyes or arse - no more great shitty tears, once conjured by panic and loathing, leading muscles to weird poo from ane gape. Coakes was back in his comfort zone.

Flicking his finger across a sensor, he saved his work and launched iTunes. He selected the Yoga Mix, and music tumbled out of the small white machine across the sand. He’d chosen the music for his mind numbing mundanity, which allowed him to focus on his breathing. Cold war kids, followed Zero Seven, followed the Beatles. Melody had set this up. Precocious little bint. He guffed and assumed the position ‘Worm Salutes the Sun’. He loved Yoga, it was the perfect excersize, you felt mildly uncomfortable when you did it, and when you’d finished you felt totally reinvigorated because you’d been lying down for an hour or so.

Afterwards he jogged back to the cottage and showered. The housekeeper Maria, that legless wonder, was cleaning the kitchen, pulling herself along the worktops as she polished. He sat on the sofa in his towel, and called her. Maria, honey, can I get an ice-tea. He chuckled to himself. He’d moved all the drinks right to the top of the fridge last night when she’d been oiling her chair. After only a few moments, she emerged from the kitchen with a glass in her hand. Coakes was infinitely disappointed.
“Thank you Maria. Sit by me bambino.” He patted the cushion next to him, a puff of dust rose. She looked at him a moment, then clambored up ungainly. Coakes gave her a firm prod, unbalancing the girl. Her head landed on his groin, the thin white towel twitched. She started to rise, pushing herself up with her hairy arms. Coakes’ firm hands pushed her back down. She didn’t resist hard enough. He could tell she didn’t really mind. Coakes could have wet with happiness as he introduced her to the humbler. He loosed great onion farts, and swallowed his ice tea. It was good. Afterwards as he heaved himself into her arse, tonguing her stumps as they flapped uselessly in the air, Coakes came to a decision. It was time to go home.

The long walk back up the hill to the cottage was always Coakes’ favourite part of the day. Physically and mentally exhausted after his rigours at the beech, he’d puff up the climb, his mind close to blank, reaching toward that state of nothingness Buddhists imagined to be perfection. His thoughts were white blank, empty as his body moved of its own accord up the hill. His mind could not linger and his woes, many and deep - his yearning for television, the great bushy pubis of the Greek waiter, the red tilled restroom of a desert motel - could not impact upon him.

At the apex of the hill the view over the island could steal your breath, but Coakes didn’t care. He did not notice the mountains, the old temple where the local kids went when they wanted privacy, like their parents and grandparents and grandparents’ grandparents before them, the olive trees, wild and unkempt, the sweep of the landscape down towards the fast crescent of white buildings at the port, and above it the squat wee fort, pock marked from shelling during the war, the only time the Nazi’s had marked the island. Coakes flat feet ached, as ever, slapping against the tarmac of the slope down toward the cottage. He was hungry too, images of grub eroding his zen, and he found himself hoping the Maria girl had cooked something. She better have changed the sheets in his room, too.

The pitiful creature had knocked over some vase or something as he’d left that morning. Striking a table with the axels of that damn chair she lounged in. He’d decided then to forbid the infernal machine. Her chair was no longer allowed in the house. He’d seen her fly round the place on her hands, and he’d be damned if the bitch would spunk his deposit on broken crockery. Her dragging legs would give the floor a good brush too.
She’d stared at him, sullen and fat, but did as instructed. He patted her on the head, to let her know she’d pleased him.

Now, as he walked down the hill, the sun beating on the back of his neck, making him look Texan, he noticed a man lounging on his bench, under the dying lemon tree. Coakes’ breath caught in his throat. It could only be the waiter. He hadn’t been down in almost a week, not since that night. The Greek lent forward and shading his eyes from the sun, stared up at him. Coakes gave a nod reluctantly approached. The sun felt too hot on the back of his neck, and he was very conscious of his copious sweating. He sat down next to the waiter, not looking at him, not at his face anyway.

“Mr Coakes, how are you? We have not seen you at the cafe for a number of days now. We all were concerned. I was concerned.”
“I have a housekeeper, now. She cooks for me.”
“Ah yes, the wheeliegirl.” The waitor smiled, running his fingertips over fat black lips. “I am sure she serves you well… Only, how does she reach the cooker?”
“She jumps.” Coakes let out a long breath and stretched the toes of his feet out of his sandals. He was growing increasingly uncomfortable. He couldn’t get the image of the deck’s wooden boards out of his mind, couldn’t forget the bloody seaweed tang of cave water.
The waiter seemed to smile beneath his great moustache, “Will you dine with us this evening? My wife is preparing wild boar.”
“Your wife?” Coakes was startled, “I thought..”
A silence, the waitor watching him, his smile unwavering as Coakes stared straight ahead.
“You thought perhaps I was a homosexualist? No, there’s no such thing, only people. We did something all friends do here.” He laid a hirsute hand on Coakes’ thigh, “you have no need for shame.”

Coakes watched as the waiter stood and walked down the hill toward the town. He scratched at a flaky bit of skin on the back of his hand, until it bled. As the sunlight died across the hills, he surrendered awkwardly inside.

Coakes sat on the very edge of the flat brown sofa where the maid slept. He was farting rhythmically into a pillow, pleased with the familiar sensation, his ane blowing open and closing like a guppy fishes mouth. The pillow was a yellowing duck down affair he allowed the housekeeper to use at night. Coakes’ notebook lay open in his lap. A mechanical voice, like the one Hawkins affected, read Coakes’ words back to him. A verbose grandiloquent durge. He wasn’t sure where it would go in the novel, or whether it would become a review, whatever. It was fucking good though, even with that mechamong’s voice monotoning it to him. He almost stiffened over how good it was. He lent forward, his arse cleaving a bite of the pillow, pulling it forward with him, and changed the bit about toasted bread to a eulogy to cereal. It resonated more with Coakes. He’d never had those fancy coloured breakfasts as a child. He’d had the dour tasting beige ones, the functional ones that made you shit round lunch time.

He half stood, making sure the table hid his nakedness, and watched the cleaner huff about the kitchen on her stumps. He glanced down at the pillow and swore. A brown wet patch had blossomed in the centre. He felt at his crack. It was slimy warm. He’d definitely shit himself again. It was happening much too much since the waiter had..

Sighing, he flippped over the pillow and fled to the bathroom to shower. When he emerged, dressed and groomed from his room, the Greek was there, seated at his bench in the cool evening breeze. As Coakes left the house, his sandals crunching at the gravel, the waiter rose and walked to the small grey seated scooter standing just by, and straddled it. He patted the seat behind him. Coakes coughed a laugh, and climbed on, resting some wine in the wire basket just above the solitary head light.

They grumbled off down the hill, free wheeling mostly over the potholes and bumps. Coakes soon had a healthy hard, pressed fast against the waiters arse. The Greek laughed and pushed back against his firmness.
“You see Iago, in Greece, we’re friends now.”

My work requires that I spend much of my time alone.

Henry Rollins

I’m a lean dog, a keen dog, a wild dog, and alone.

Rutherford McLeod, Lone Dog

“The Lovefish?” Coakes guffawed, thinking it a bulls vagina, a filthy fisherman’s ruse.
“Indeed the Mediterranean Lovefish. Chef will cook it as his caprice takes him. As do all who cook the Lovefish and hope to retain its flavour”.
Coakes merely nodded, numbed by the obvious tripe. The waiter walked a few steps then looked round.
“Mr Iago, you must know that whoever eats the Lovefish will fall in love, forever, within a year”. But then he smiled, and clapped Coakes on the back, and wandered off into the kitchen yelling in Greek. Coakes was shaken by the blow to his ever-vulnerable shoulder blades, and almost without realising it, lifted the poesy from the table and sniffed deeply at the scent which had filled him with panic and nausea earlier.

The fish arrived with the with the dying of the day. Butter with fresh smashed garlic was drizzled on the back, with lemon segments forming a guard of honour, a pithy little 300. The fish looked unremarkable. The waiter returned with a pair of heavily carved wooden skewers. He, desperately slowly, slid them under the fish and then carefully flipped it over, spraying butter and white garlic onto the table. The underside of the fish looked stained, blue, black to purple and orange and green, slick like spilt crude oil. Just as slowly and just as carefully the waiter pulled a knife from a sheath at his side and slid the pale blade under the skin, peeling it back. White flesh shocked under the dark scales, and then, half way along, the waiter stopped.

He stood back a little and breathed deep. As Coakes reached a fork to the aquine meat the waiter stopped him. “All is not yet clear”, and smiled again. He slipped the knife back between flesh and skin and started to peel once more, then with a sudden jerk it was all gone, a black pile in one corner of the plate. There in the centre of the fishes white was a bright tiny piece of flesh, in the shape of a strawberry, or perhaps a heart, of the old comic book style. Iago laughed out loud, delighted, clapping his flippers together.

The meal tasted of nothing, the heart more so, with a tougher texture. Coakes ate slowly and stared out to sea. The last rays of the sun played gently on the tops of the mountains behind. The sounds of the town faded. The sea grew louder. Somewhere a seagull squalled, then dived into the foam. A fishing boat putt-putted into the harbour, the men laughing and shouting on board. A truck barked into life and they loaded the catch, then wandered away into the dying evening. The truck trundled up the hill, toward one of the fish yards.

When Coakes had put down his fork, and had wiped the remnants of the butter and garlic with the sour bread, the waiter came down with a bottle. It was clear glass, with no markings and a fat cork holding the amber liquid. In his other hand he held a pair of fine crystal goblets, with a thin border of gold, horrible chinzy things for dull brained tourists. He filled the glasses, then took his seat next to Coakes. The waiter lifted his glass in salute to the sea and sipped a little. Coakes did likewise, self-consciously copying. The liquor was think and tasted almost like some childhood medicine, but the fumes swelled in his nose and burnt the back of his throat, stripping the lining. Coakes wanted to cough, but instead stared out to sea. They sat like that for the longest time, neither looking at the other, just sipping and staring, with tiny movements coming closer together. Coakes lit an Ambassador Menthol, his after dinner smoke, and offered the pack to the waiter, who gave so sign of noticing the gesture. Coakes returned to watching the ocean, staring at its hugeness, as if all the good and horror of the world were way at the other side, and perhaps here, on this veranda, they were safe.

Coakes felt a hand rest on his thigh. He stared at it, the dark hairy claw, then looked to the waiter, in a deliberate motion. The waiter smiled at his defensiveness, “Iago, we should do something”.
“What?” he could hardly breathe.
“Tomorrow, the café is closed, we will take my brothers boat. I will show off the cave of St. Felix”.
Coakes stared back out to sea and let out a long breath. He longed to fart, he had a capital quake building, but felt it might ruin the moment, in the same way it would improve so many others, and for the same reasons. A heart, someone’s, lumped against Coakes’ rigid chest, thick blood trundling like rail carts in his ears, drowning the sea.
“Oh, no, no, thanks. I mean honestly you’ve been really kind but..”
The waiter shook his head kindly, the great moustache cooling Coakes face with the breeze of its passage.
“No. It’s no problem. It’s my pleasure. I come bring you early.”
“No, no, really. I mean, I don’t think I should because..”
“You afraid. You afraid that I wan’ make fuck with you.”
“What?” Coakes gulped and looked at the waiter, admiring the way the evening light caught that great native chin. He was afraid. Afraid to hope.
“Of course I wan’ make fuck with you, you are beautiful Coakes. Man would be crazy not want to make fuck with you. But I don’t ask you to fuck. I ask you to come on brothers boat. Different thing. Boat is boat. Fuck is fuck. So I come tomorrow morning nine o’clock? I bring food, I bring wine, and we go. Tomorrow, I just make you happy? No need to be sad. And no need to be afraid, I give word of honour. I don’t try to make fuck with you. Okay?”
Coakes was silent for a long moment. “Okay. See you in the morning.”
After a moment, the waiter stood and walked back to the kitchen carrying the plates. Coakes left a stack of monopoly money on the table and walked slowly up the hill. Christ he wished there were a taxi. He was out of breath before he started.

The cliffs were high and at the very top nestled a ruined and overgrown temple of Zeus. White-faced birds with bulbous black bodies that seemed to defy logic flitted in and out of the cave. White stains and tiny stacks of twigs punctuated the black volcanic rock of the cliffs. For a while a Greek saint, St Felix, had lived in the cave, escaping the Turkish heathens. He’s subsisted on a diet of rain water and the seaweed stinking meat of the birds, until one day a fisherman had spotted the glow of a fire in the cave at dusk, and Felix became St Felix. The waves had washed against the cliff face for long enough to have made a little beach of grey sand, famous for stranding people - only approachable on foot during the lowest tide. Perhaps one day someone would die there.

A long blue fishing boat motored into the cove. On deck were two men. One wore a dark shirt, blue jeans and a cap. He wore the complexion of bark and a great moustache. The other was a thin, bemuscled man in a yellow shell suit, with shoulder length yellow hair. He stood at the prow, staring up at the cliffs. He called something over his shoulder to the one in blue, who joined him, wresting a hand on his lower back, then broke off and walked to the small wheel at the back, cutting the engine. He moved to the side and threw the anchor over. The slack was soon taken up and the boat stopped, turning gradually so that its prow faced the incoming tide. The dark man never heard the other come up behind him, walking on the balls of his feet. He moved suddenly, pushing the dark man hard so fell over the side. The one on deck doubled up laughing at the splashing and swearing. He bent, offering a hand, to help the other man back onto the boat. The dark, wet man grasped it, then yank! Yellow flashes in the air then splutters and splashes as he joined his comrade in the water, all laughs and horseplay. Wet sex happened, a hard-core montage.

Coakes sat on the wooden bench on the veranda of the cottage. A cushion nestled under his fleshy arse. He had not dared put on his white writers suit today, in the same way a woman will not wear white when expecting menstruation. He sipped the icy lemonade and gin and placed it back on the table. A large map of America was spread out in front of him and his laptop lay untouched. He couldn’t write today, he didn’t want to think at all.
He stood, in need of a piss, and the pain of straightening caught his breath. He ducked into the cottage and walked slowly to the bathroom. As he pissed the long and deep yellow of dehydration, he stared at his face in the mirror. He hadn’t looked at himself since the Waiter had traced the scars and stretch marks of his belly with his tongue, “A map of your beauty”…

His eyes were deep set, seeming to have fled into his skull. Black rings languished under them. The cheeks beneath were callow and although the skin was tanned, appeared pale and bloodless. His lips were a violent red, as if painted. He looked closer, leaning toward the mirror. They were painted, with lipstick. That rat bastard Greek must have done it, as he lay sleeping and sun-burning on deck. But he remembered the truth too, lying there, his head resting on the waiters lap, as the man fingered his locks, calling him a pretty girl, remembered running below, eager to please, grabbing a lipstick from the sideboard where it lay, expectant, spreading it on roughly. He’d wrapped himself in a towel, emerged coyly from the bowls of the ship, and done everything asked of him, leaving bright red smears on that oaken Hellenic trowel.

Coakes snapped back. He was stood still at the john, staring at his lips, his dick hard. He stared down at the penile organ. There was a hard, but with none of the usual complications. His hand felt for his anus - no faecal matter clung there.
“By Christ, I’ve won!”
But alas, dear reader, as our hero revelled in his liberation, the illness welled up. Images of hacksaws and showers, meat, piss, sand thick in his mouth, hands fat and strong, a swan thin neck, Gore’s face laughing, the smell of the fire. Coakes’ knees buckled and he fell, near miss head-butting the ceramic toilet bowl, vomit flummoxing in great chunks down his front, into his drooping fringe.

“Are you OK?” A twanged midwestern accent. Coakes jerked his head round, tummy juice smeared on his chin and shirt. A fat girl sat in a wheel chair, Brittany Spears T shirt stretched to monstrous proportions on her frame. Her legs ended in unceremonious stumps just below the knees. She was plump and young and Coakes couldn’t remember where he’d seen her before.
“Get the fuck out.” He stumbled to his feet and wiped his face with a paper towel, meant for smearing shit away, leaving little white balls of the stuff on his chin. Coakes splashed a little tap water around his chops, then wiped clean with a towel, smearing the red lipstick across it. He laboured to make sure it was all gone. He put he dick away and tried to get the sick out of his hair, lost patience and slicked it back behind his ears.
Who the hell was the fuck was the girl? Coakes couldn’t be sure, but felt that he’d remember if his daughter was a cripple, so that counted out Melody. She didn’t look like his usual paid company. Bile rose up again. Coakes collected himself and marched boldly into the sitting room, long bouncy steps, unconsciously mocking her disability with his very gait.

The girl was waiting on the veranda, a little in the shade. She was tracing a plump digit across the various interstate highways that crisscrossed America, smiling beatifically. In the sunlight Iago could see that she was not American, or at least not a true American. Her skin was a cold coffee brown, hair a shock of black, barely controlled by elasticated ties and reaching nearly to her waist. A fine downy fluff hovered just above her top lip and her eyebrows embraced in the middle of her forehead.

“The fuck are you?”
She looked up, “Mr Coakes?”
“Yeah”, he let out a real bleater. The illness had passed and was nearly forgotten.
“I’m Maria,” she smiled as if he gave a fuck. The girl caught his dead eyed stare, added “The housekeeper? My dad set it up? I’ve come all the way from Rhodes…”

Coakes continued to stare. She looked as if she might cry, scrubbed a chubby palm through her hair, pushing errant strands back. His eyes rested on her stumps for a few seconds then took in her surprisingly flat chest. Usually girls that size had breasts you could flop over their shoulders. Coakes scratched his balls, killing a sweat itch. He recalled some conversation with her father. “Yeah, sure.” He let out another long flappy fart, immediately reverting to the vicious arrogance he employed with all such menials. “Right, I want you to tidy this shit hole up, and then fuck off down to the village and get some groceries, I’ll make a list….” He snapped out orders automatically, with none of the half hearted flirtation he employed with even the ugliest women. Domestics didn’t really count as people, fucking them was like a less energetic wank, and almost pointless.

“Sir, might I ask, how am I to get the groceries up here. Its a steep hill, and I find it hard on my own.”
Coakes guffawed good naturedly. “Listen, I’m an equal opportunities employer. You’ll do same as anyone else. It’ll do you good, you chubby bitch, now fuck off inside and set to work. I have a novel to finish.”

Coakes took a sip from his Vente Coffee Base Frappachino iced drink, and nodded confidently. Christ he was good. This latest chapter would set the coon amongst the virgins. He’d show them. Hemmingway, Hemmingwho? Hemmingfuck.

Paul Oakely was known universally by his pen name Oakley. He was ruggedly handsome. His hair blonde and spiked, had caused an international incident at Bruges the year before, when an African queen, wanted for the worst of war crimes: simony, fell in love with it. She’d offered Oakley any sum of money in return for it, and when he’d turned her down, she’d ordered a Zulu jihad upon it. Oakley, in response had promised NATO a base in his hair if they’d protect it. They’d installed a small radar station as part of the deal that Oakley passed off as a trendy hat.

Quietly recognised as one of the most brilliant journalists of his day; Oakley had covered every massacre in Africa, the Balkans, and the South America in the last ten years. He was so highly thought of that a squadron of British SAS paratroopers were embedded with him rather than the other way round. He’d been in the Torra Borra caves when Bin Ladin, an old school acquaintance, had ordered 9/11, and in the Pentagon when the Americans had planned how to make it work.

Despite this, Oakley was afflicted. The public misunderstood his fervour and brilliance for hard handed brutality. As Camus wrote, ‘No man is an island, except a really fat man swimming in the sea. He is an Island.’ Oakley had exema on his shins, and as a child had taken the appearance of a broiled ham, all raw and dry and chewy. In adulthood, only his legs were spoiled. Periodically they bled, lending him the appearance of a tampon thighed raggydoll.

Yesterday, after his big toe clicked, again, too loudly, Oakley had become sure he had some obscure bone wasting disease. He daren’t climb his stairs, lest he fall and land in a heap of bone and wasted talent. He’d called his whore of an ex-wife, a swollen sow who’d chosen prostitution - despite generous alimony checks - out of sheer oily lust. A leach, a monstrous skank, a woman who’d pulled more cock into her stinky, half rotted pissmouth, than Oakley had video casettes. And Oakley loved his video casettes.
He’d told her of his disease, that it was degenerative, that he’d die of it.. She’d told him to go whine to the Samaratins. He’d asked politely, rolling on the floor in a brave tolerance of the mighty agonies inflicted on his shins, if he could hold off taking care of his beloved daughter, Melanie, till this latest attack abated. Quick snap the bitch was in with, “Melanie is staying with you prag. I’ve plans cock sucker, I’m off to NY for a party at Le Trapeze, and you are going to pen the princess till I return.”
Oakley was incredibly cool, and handled the situation like a man.
“Listen, if you want some sixteen stone black to pound you in the ass with his forearm that’s fine, but if you think you’re going to bring up our angel, my sweet tiramasu, whom I love, who you’ve taken away from me, just so you can get your unmentionable holes filled with the septic semen of over sexed negros, you woke up on the wrong side of real, sister.”
At this, his ex wife burst into tears.
“Oh Oakley, you’re right. I’m so sorry. I was wrong to leave. Selfish. I’m a whore and a slut. Why don’t we both look after Melanie this weekend. I can tend to your legs. We can snuggle up and act like this horrible mess, this temple to shit, of which I’m the sole architect, never happened. God I love you Oakley, you magnificent beautiful man.”
“No babe, that boat sailed long ago. Just take care of Melanie. And wear a rubber.”

So Oakley found himself reluctantly alone, one that he thought might have been spent in fancy museums and sunny ballparks teaching things to his adoring protégée. Instead he called his agent to ask if there were any stories worth chasing. Oakley was in such demand that his agent employed his own agent to filter all the chaff away, and a team of writers to researcher and file stories that would have merely distracted the great man.

Oakley’s be-freckled little freak of an agent piped up, voice high and effeminate, “Oakley, sir, there’s an offer from the Chinese government to take part in an involuntary abortion. They’ve tracked down the future mother of the Dali Lama’s reincarnation, and want the foetus killed live on national television for separatist decadence. Thailand have elected you prime minister in absentia and then seem to have overthrown you in a bloodless coup d’etat, and now want you to do a documentary about it, and then put you trial for corruption. The Swiss Peoples Party have offered you a permanent position as minister of sublime truth, after the success of those election adverts you did.”

Oakey smiled and shook his head, the NATO radar beeping alarmingly. The Swiss had the right idea, but he could never serve any country other than the homeland. He looked out to the star spangled banner that screamed America to the breeze beyond the window of his white Colonial-style mansion.
“Enough of this politics bullshit, anything else or do you want to fire yourself?”
“There’s another plea from you ex-wife to take her back, and…”
“Already?”
“Yes, and well, there’s some passes from a small but controversial rock group for their LA tour.” The agent coughed, “Maybe you should think about the China story. People eat that gook shit up. You’re almost guaranteed another Pulitzer”
“Fuck off”.

Oakley ran a hand through his hair, carefully avoiding the tiny dish; and decided on the rock band. It was here in LA. If they weren’t outrageous enough then fuck them, they would be by the time Oakley had finished. Thalidomide Orgy sounded banal enough on their MySpace, pretentious cunts. Well he had a weekend to kill, so long as his crumbling bones lasted the gig.

Hours later Oakley strode manfully into his home. There was a story here. He sat down on his custom Eames chair, and rested his feet on the Ottoman that accompanied it. His black t-shirt, a signed original crew tee from Dire Straits ninteen eight five Brothers in Arms tour, he’d bought at Sotheby’s a few years back, so encrusted with sweat, his own and others, that in places dry white salt crystals had formed. Over it, his khaki vest, his trade mark apparel, full of used photographic film, scraps of paper and ladies undergarments; as many of which had been cast in his direction as at the band. He always wore his reporters vest. It held vital things, like emergency flares, notebooks, pens, a pocket PC, his camera, an air canister for inflating it as a life vest, a Zyklon B gas canister for clearing crowds, and a small smint dispenser. It was bullet proof, flame proof and a fucking chick magnet. It was everything he needed to be at the centre of the action. The John Rocha designed khaki and paisley palette brought out the blue of his eyes and the blonde of his hair.

The gig had been held in one of those enclosed pockets of green which city people imagine resemble nature. Maybe twelve thousand people were there, crowded hard against the pitch black stage. As a cliché, Hells Angles provided the security. Burly hairy losers on dirty fat motorcycles kept the crowd pushed up. The music was loud if unoriginal. The band looked like generic freaks, all leather and animal skins. They played as if they hated the crowd, all crowing and swearing, their lyrics dull attempts at controversy.

It had got interesting for Oakley’s about half way through when the angels had attacked on mass, not the hells angels, but the actual angels of our lord Jesus Christ, outraged by the blasphemy. They rode their brutal black motorcycles directly into the crowd, chains and bats and machetes swinging. They were drugged out of their minds, all bloodshot like the Viking berserkers they resembled.

Instead of stopping the gig or begging the Angels to desist their savagery, ‘Orgy’ had played louder and faster, yelling encouragement, before finally the lead singer, half fellating a skull mike, ordered them to dismount and back off. The angels obeyed immediately, and moved back to encircle the crowd, now bloodied and terrified. Oakley had seen that look before; on the faces of eight thousand men and boys at Srebrenica just before the shooting started. They knew what was coming. They surged toward the stage to flee in the only direction possible. The tall blonde singer reached out a hand to help a pregnant lady. Then laughing, cut her down. The angels stampeded in on foot. Oakley, safe in his press box, considered it the best gig he’d ever seen. He’d even bought the CD.

What lasting joys the man attend
Who has a polished female friend

Whurr, The Accomplished Female Friend

This thing right here
Is lettin all the ladies know
What guys talk about
You know
The finer things in life
Hahaha
Check it out

Sisqo, Thong Song

A thong for Juliet. Tonight we’ll be the black lacy bad girl under an American Apparel summer dress. We scrub on tides and oceans Juliet, rich tawny tin o tint, daub everywhere; catch knee backs humming to Fiddy on the stereo, reach our shoulder blades with roller stick and stretch bent back arms.
We bounce Juliet, wall to wall in this pea pod home for petit pois people. We pause before vanity and lay on spiderweb mascara, long thin and crunchy. We look good. We’re quick and careful Juliet, enamelling on itchy eye shadow, green to match our dress my Juliet, above our canyon slung eyes.
Jules, we stretch and stand stock still, posing while the last of our can o tan dries. We touch up streaks and gaps and bare white blotches where the skin breaks through, till we’re perfect Juliet, and cooked all over.
We curl Juliet, we heat and fold rebellious twirls and clumps of flighty split fraught mane. We slip on our dress, slink and lithe beneath a halo of razor wire curls, and we remember granny from below, translucent insects asleep on her head, in their white hard cylindrical cocoons.
We stretch down the lips my Juliet, the tasselled ends of our short short dress, rearranging the strategic trade off between butt and boob. We stretch our stockings long across our chequered sheets, inspect for snakes and ladders. Slink them on Juliet, dark over beech wood bows of calf.
At last the boots Juliet. Leather beauties, black polished to a Martin Sheen, with heel thrust cruel arches to pale foot binding. Sweet penance Juliet, price of perfection.
The finished we twirls in the mirror; hot, Balearic, succubean.
We slip into the taxi Juliet, and the driver fixes us with the stare he would give money; peeling our skirt up in the rear view mirror. We watch the streets go by, the oily mucky streets, the streets that hold us back, home places, slums. We watch them change to the twinkling blinking glory of the evening Juliet, the night come out to dance. Pop into McDowells to meet our fine fair fettered friends.
The clubs are like a game we play, with simple rules but hard and quick opponents. The girls dance, pretending not to notice the boys. The boys stare, pretending to be able to dance. One grabs us Juliet, a tall bellicose brigand, in a uniform we recognise, striped silk shirt, tired chords and lank blonde locks; all chins and wayward inclinations. We shake him off and weave away to hotter richer climes; the tough shook bounty of real men. We find a prospect, well built and unshaven, an ape in leisure suited uncoordination. We slink up real close, sweating the moist night to rust his metal. We move against him Juliet, and toss our curls before him like a veil. The chinned man gropes us back, his fingers in our hair, his breath sharp stinging lush. We know him, we think we know him all smirking and sure, happy happy, he has one of those faces we remember, we’ve seen him somewhere, we can never be sure of such things.

After this evening Juliet, we wake up wet. We wake up sweaty in a strange room under a strangers arm. Not nude, but naked, and our sweat Juliet, is some quick cooling aftersun, soothing the heat under our skin.
We roll closer Juliet. Press ‘gainst the wheezing man bulk on the bed, and shuffle out our arm, in slight hard tugs. We lay there, wiping beads of sweat out from beneath our breasts, out from the pool collecting at our bellybutty. We swing Juliet, ever so slow, so that our feet hit the coarse hair of the carpet, so that the evening scatters moon patina on our darkened skin.
This rich man’s house is quiet Juliet, the bedrooms all mahogany veneered Ikea and neat black-wood framed art. Juliet, we hug our knees close and cradle our chin between them, twin tanned calf soft sisters, bone hard underneath the skin. We unfold to our feet, and walk soft to the open looming wardrobe. Juliet, we silently peel out a thick wool overcoat, climb into it, and lift our sodden hair from the small of our back and lay it outside the coat, shifting against the silk within to dry our back.
A little warmer Juliet, a little safer in the woolly armoured coat, we edge our way into the moonlit hall, and start exploring. The floors are all slick wood, slung together even, tight and flat, parquet black ice under our feet. The hall has four framed posters, shiny news anchors, a little offset, two to each wall, like the walk from the green room of a studio to the flare bright TV stage.
His kitchen is catalogue, all chromed fittings and noiseless sliding cabinets. His fridge is huge, blinking Goliath, packed with rotting chum. Not that we’d eat Juliet, not that we’d ever feed in the house of a stranger.
We settle Juliet, we settle on the sticky leather couch in the living room, before the high slung wide screen plasma, up on the wall above the fake French fireplace, with its faux French coal scuttle.
We flick through the static of the AM. The horror channel, the god channel, the how to use your Tevo channel. We settle on shopping, the red speaker in the top right corner blinking mute.
Hank Hankson, who works in Target off Santa Monica, who used to offer us ‘five bucks for a finger’ in the yard in fifth grade, he’s told us that these plasma screens, they only last for three years, maybe five tops; before the picture burns in, or the plasma leaks and has to be replaced. Maybe Juliet, that’s the point. Nothing worth anything can last forever.
Juliet, on the screen this guy, carrot orange with an airhostess spray tan, wearing clear wet purple lipstick, he’s selling gem cut diamond rings for thirty nine ninety five, act now and get his necklace absolutely free.
And the guy from the bar, Juliet he lumbers over the couch, slams down to gasp behind us, spooning. He lips the nape of our neck, and wordless slips a hand inside our coat, and up our leg, and up inside us. And the guy on the screen, he’s pulling out an earring set, matching gold lame with discretely inset pearls. It all comes absolutely free.

We always feel beautiful, don’t we Juliet? In the mornings, in the hazy sun mornings, walking down strange streets, returning to the land of screams.
We get the bus, it takes forever, but we don’t mind, we like the view; whispering through Encino, Fairfax, West Adams. Ma’s awake, cold coffee and cigarettes shuffling before her on the table. She’s fat, and her eyes are drained of colour. Juliet, one day we’ll look just like her.
‘Well, have a good night?’, she asks. ‘I hope you did. I hope you had a great old time. ‘Cause your father and me were worried to death. You nearly killed us.’
We walk to the dishy sink, and look out over the wood walled back yard, and the brown scruff of the dog, curled up like dirt, asleep in purgatory.

Juliet is looking top totty today, TTT, yes we are. Jules sinks our teeth into this sweaty burger, its glossy juices mucking up our makeup. Jules watches ourselves glutton in the mirror. We chew, chew, chew at the malty salty meat, suckle up the grease, slosh the hefty lumps of butchered gristle round our apply cheeks, and swallow down the filth. Coaksey’s here all chub and grim stop eating eyes. He grabs our hands and spits into our mouth.

“Your such a pretty girl, don’t ruin it. Daddy knows your gonna sick that up. Sick it up for Daddy.”

We can taste our lipsticks blueberry metal bite, it’s been laid on thick, and Juliet, oh Juliet, it’s rubbing off on the meat. Jules, our face in the mirror’s like a clowney face. Juliet, clown whore, Juliet, lady boy.
Our foundation’s burger wiped in a ragged circle round our lips, dripped clean to a glistening skin beneath. Juliet, we’re chugging greedily, pumping the meat inside, choking the buttery, fatty fat fat fat. Swallow Juliet swallow.

Body slam, he’s kneeling over, we’re on the floor. Straw in his mouth, sipping syrup thickly, his jaws masticating words. His fists in the air again, I smile. “Fat bitch. I’m sorry. Please stop eating, you’ll be ugly, everybody’s watching. No one likes a fatty.” He says this, suckling, breathing syrup heavy through his chub chub cheeks. Yes Daddy, you are right of course.

Juliet, we’re finished, it’s all gone, real gone. The glisteny oil bloated chips, the calorific pulpy burger, lathered in salad cream mayonnaise. On the floor we watch it slip away. We burp blood.
Juliet, we wipe our grease grim hands off on our cheeks, we stand up in this shitty burger bar, this lardy temple, in front of all these nobodies, and we smile smile smile.
Coakesy watches as we walk to the little girls room. Click click click. We walk Marilyn Monroe, because Some Like It Hot, we walk Loran Bacall in the Maltese Falcon. We swing Juliet, we swing and we sway,
We pop into a cubicle, a half doored steel walled crematorium.
“Guffing,” he says “Guffing Dank,” and “Yeah bitch puke.”

Juliet, he holds our hair up, sore tight to a neat pony tail. We kneel on these bleak stained tiles, we hug the bowl, slick with grubbed deposits. He rubs at our back, helping it come. He whispers “There there, Sugertits.” And “Yeah”. Juliet, we lean in over these tides of septic burgery eruptions, and we purge Juliet, we purge!

I never had a piece of toast, particularly long and wide, but fell upon the sanded floor, and always on the buttered side.

James Payn

Iago Coakes gripped a heavy tumbler, one quarter full and grunted his way through the academic tribunal. He’d developed a crippling flu - his throat coated in gravel, his nose plugged with steaming pitch. With all that and the provosts voice warbling through his puss glubbed ears, it took every drop of Coakes lake of bitterness just to stay awake.
Afterward he sat, dizzy on the exam hall steps, as they filed out, aloof in ermine. Stripped of his doctorate, bent double and wracked with snot, the big man began to cry.
Not since he’d been trapped in a pit of multi-ethnic, disembodied scrotes, attached via a grim fovea of ropey nerves to Alan Rickman’s brain and face, had Coakes felt so dirty. Sitting alone in Dublin airport, he began to comfort eat. He gorged on Haagen Dazs, on Eton mess, on Baklava, Pavlova and baked Alaska. He suckled at the teat of chocolate cake, gargled treacle pudding and inhumed banana spits. Sweat pooled in the muscle pouches of neck and he loosed his jodhpurs dramatically. Deep in the stupor of food a disembodied voice seemed to cry out, to call his name again and again. It was the tannoy, Coakes had a phone call.

“Big C, it’s not good.”
“Drop it on me Marty, just let it fall.”
“They’ve taken your Pulitzer.”
“Holy Borges.”
“It gets worse.”
“How could it not…”
“I hate to be the one to tell you this.”
“By the boat your whore of a mother rode in on, spit it out.”
“Albatross have reneged on your book deal and… Magnolia have killed the movie.”

Coakes dropped to his knees, the phones ancient bakelite mouth piece loose in his hand. His eyes, confused, wandering, focused on a chocolate stain, dark and round and sweating, new and previously unheeded, a crinkling coastline of fjords and salmon sanded bays, a milk-tray praline puddle in his crotch.

“What. About. My. Advance?”
“Toast.”
Coakes began to rhythmically slap the heavy receiver against his face and skull. Marty’s muffled voice continued remorselessly.
“Iago, my boy, listen. Don’t use your cellphone. The fed have been snooping round the office, I’m calling from a pay-phone across the street.”

Coakes lost all feeling in his arm, suddenly, completely. He stood in silence, taking in the hand, which lay, foreign to him, limp and unresponsive, the phone’s receiver swinging, Marty’s voice, broken and babbling through the bustle of the airport.

“Some artist…Playground of hate…Found your semen in the bodies.”

A splintering crack, wood like a gun shot in the night, and he is in, squeezing his girth through the ragged hole, track bottoms shredding on the splintered edges. Inside, all is quiet, warm but cooling in the nights stiff breeze. The man stands, and tilting his head a little, scratches his rusty beard in the gathering dark. He strides into the living room, pushing through sticky yellow fly-strips of police tape, somehow certain of his way. His steel toed boots, army surplus, hard and pungent, click across the kitchen. Softly the great Gorenje fridge door peels open, blinding him, the reek of dying condiments strident and cheeky. Reaching into cold with a duffel sleeved paw, he finds a carton of chocolate milk, contents suspiciously viscous, and raises it to crusty lips.

The man gags, but swallows deeply, now panting in relief. In the fridge light his beard and hair are knotted, filthy. Closing the door he lifts an iPod from his pocket, and clicks a button, brightening the room. With the machine held before him, he passes on into the den, Carter at Tut’s tomb, fingers sailing lovingly over the dusty surface of the television. To its left a bookshelf has been peeled back, cracked open to reveal the solid veneer, rows of wooden covers, beyond it a gap black opening the pastel yellow wall. He passes on, hip torch before him like a talisman. The room beyond is windowless, neatly bisected by row upon row of metal shelving. Empty. Here and there a discarded jewel case lies broken, labelless, winking. He closes his eyes and he can see them - bondage, diaper fetish, scat, guro and skull fucking, zoophilia and furries frotting, grannies groaning, Russians boning, brutal Slavic pelvic thrusting, vein mapped tranny cocks with ruby darling lips for suckling. He moans, low and desperate, strokes now empty shelves. Gone, all of it, years of effort, thousands of misspent dollars, buckets of glistening semen, pounds of rouge, acres of downy calf.
It’s then he notes the silent interloper, cocky, grinning, a furred thing, proud and jaunty on its hind legs, gnawing at the air like a pill fiend. He returns that icy, deadly smile, backs out into the living room. This place belongs to them now, the biting, scurrying things, all hair and claws and teeth and slick dead eyes.

He lights a cigarette from a cheap pack, not his brand, reclines on soft Italian leather. Faces the television. Fumbling in the couches sweaty crack he finds the magic pointy thing, switches on his machine. The great screen pops to life, and curtains swing back, virtually opulent.
Somehow he can’t focus, the figures on the screen are pink and purple lipstick smudges, disappearing behind the slow blinks of his tired old eyes. Their voices - echoing, crystallising, keening treble - pain him. He’s a junky emptying a spike into a thick rich vein and feeling nothing, feeling the absence of nothing. He seizes up, curls his toes against the tight confines of tough leather. From hidden speaker - above, behind, in front and either side, a high drone rises. He backs away, over the couch, lands on his neck and dizzy rises, turning, running from the TV like a screaming foaming mouth, its billion voices keening, then he’s out the door and flying, tarmac louder in the dark.

Coakes stumbled into a stinking cubical. He had to press his shins tight to the bowl to get the door closed. Someone had smeared shit onto the wall, and below it was a jumble of graffiti and boasts and phone numbers. The mechanism for the toilet must have been broken, the bowl was full of grey scummy water and deep darker turds. He smiled at it, recognising something of himself there.

He opened his fly, pulled out his stubby dick. A tiny human eye stared up at him from where the piss slit ought to have been, it winked at him. Coakes was used to this, by now, and winked back, reaching deeper, pulling his large ball sack forward and up, to allow a jet of urine to slosh from the gill-like gash beneath his balls. When he’d finished, he jangled his veg and put the whole tangled mess away, and zipped up. He used to enjoy pissing in the semi-public of the urinal trenches, but the eye had given him stage fright these days, and he didn’t want to weird his guest out. He spat deep sour green into the bowl, not even trying the flush. He noted a few of the more promising numbers into his pocket book before emerging, stumbling still.

O’Reilly giggled a little at his return, but more from nervousness. Coakes tucked in his long white shirt tails as the presenter held out a red rag for him to sniff. Coakes breathed it deep, and spluttered,
“Christ Bill, what the fuck was that?”
“I tried to keep it in, but it was too strong, so I loose myself unto that napkin. Thought you’d want to get it fresh.”
“You’re a hell of a good man, Bill. A good man.”
They shared a moment.
“Now where’s that fucker Murdoch?”
“Shup up. Cut his mike!” yelled O’Reilly spontaneously, and for no apparent reason. Coakes refused to take the bait. “I left him at the craps table. Iago, listen, a moment before we do this. Don’t fuck it up. It took a lot to set this evening motion.”
“Don’t be such a liberal Bill O’, we’re going to be fine.”

Coakes finished fumbling with his shirt and straightened his paisley tie. He sniffed the rag again, pocketed it, checked his hair in a mirror. Cool, all set. He began the walk towards the pit. His palms sweated. Dead eyed retirees pumped coins into slots as numbers swirled in front of them. He patted his jacket pocket, the blade was still there. His breath was shallow and harsh sounding. He kept on towards the pit, through an ever deeper sea of machines and noise.
Then he saw him, the fox king, fat and brutal looking. His guttural Aussie accent barked a laugh, and he sucked at his cigar aggressively, as if he meant to win this very personal war between him and it. Coakes took a breath, harsh smoke came at him and comforted him. He looked to Bill. Bill smiled and nodded and they started forward again.

Murdoch smiled and stepped towards him,
“Iago, old man, how long has it been?”
They had never met. It was to be played nice. They shot the shit for a while, talked Red Sox, bitches, gambling, pussy and CNN, a pet hate of both men. It played out tight and fast, each man watching the other. When the niceties were over, neither could remember what had been said.

“Listen Coakes, what do you want?”
Coakes was caught off guard and took a second to remember, and swirled the spit around in his mouth.
“A flat million per quarter for unfailingly positive reviews of everything Fox puts out. That’s it.”
“You want me to buy your praise?”
“Yes.”
“And you think I need to?”
“Yes.”
“Are you threatening me?”
“Yes.”
The place grew silent for several seconds as they eyed each other.
“Done.”

Murdoch lit a cigar and had a laugh. Coakes smiled with relief and looked towards O’Reilly who was wide eyed and happy. Coakes’ palms were sweaty and he had his usual terror hard. He wiped his hands on his slacks and shook Murdoch’s offered palm. He smiled at the baron as his left hand pulled free the stiletto blade from his jacket. A deep tug pulled Murdoch close and as the blade ripped up through the fat Aussie’s chin into his brain he whispered into his ear, “I am not for sale.”

O’Reilly kept the stunned flunkies back with a snub-nosed .38 as Coakes wrapped his arms around the dying mans chest and heaved him unto the craps table, twitching and spasming. There was surprisingly little blood yet. Coakes sheathed his knife and unsheathed his dick, massaged it between thumb and fore finger, slick with red. The tiny eye was weeping with joy as he pulled Murdoch’s leather pidgeon head back and guided himself into the wound, holding the barons face in his fat palms and fucking the skull. O’Reilly looked like he might vomit, but Coakes was in ecstasy. He could see how Murdoch worked, what made him tick. He could see his mind through the dickeye and he had no secrets any more.

Coakes came hard, not his usual weak seepage, but a full forced flood. He fell over, his legs buckling under the pleasure, striking his head on the dirty once white wall, the ruined, rotted watermelon skull slipping off his softening cock.

A fat hot tongue licks Coakes awake. He returns the kiss instinctively, desperately - blinded by the too bright sunlight, Wild Turkey hangover - surprised at the artless tenderness. The dog barks and Coakes leaps up, bends double and spits, then vomits into the grey green humus of the highway verge.
“Satan’s fiery asshole,” he says, glowering.
“I had a fucking Pulitzer, show some respect.”
The dog, unashamed of it’s amorous advances, merely wags, approaching cautiously. drops it head for Coakes to pat. It’s a handsome creature, clearly a mutt, some part setter, some part collie. Doe eyes framed in two inch lashes fawn gorgeously at him, and he pats forgiveness.
“It’s alright girl,” he says, sneaking a glimpse at the beasts undercarriage.
“Fraid you’ll have to join the que.”

On either side of the road, giant conifers scrape the sky, walling off eternities of forest. Coakes is weary of nature, and sticks to the road and the thin wet verge, the dog walking beside him, a proud scout.
“You know boy,” Coakes says, leaning in to rub the Mutt’s soft mane.
“All my life I’ve hungered. I’ve boozed and whored. I’ve smoked and I’ve snorted and I’ve hurt and been hurt… But I’ve never found my drug.”
The dog nodded sympathetically, padding along beside him, keeping back from sticky tarmac, hot and dangerous in the midday broil.
“TV came close though, that old seductress.”
Coakes grins, his eyes half closed, his full lips pouting, lost in the tender ministrations of a lover.
“All those faces bigger than life and twice as pretty, staring right at me, loving the camera, full and hot and pampered.”
Coakes’ hand creeps past the elasticated gatekeepers of trouser and under-pant. As he speaks he cradles his oily plums, a slick of drool worrying the corner of his mouth. The dog nuzzles closer, concerned, confused, its new master babbling strange breathless human words. “Exergym.” “Glistening pups.” “Ever loving couch mother.” Shaking his head, straying now into the road, shaken awake by the whoosh by trundle of an artic, fog horn blaring, “Fucker!”

They rest for the evening up and off the road, on a granite escarpment, a lip jutting out from the hive of forest, looking down and back the way they’ve come. A silent mint blue river, the road arcs away, till it gets lost in the arched and twisting humps of the Washington foothills. Coakes hangs his legs out off the edge, dangling two hundred feet above the roof of hooded black. Everywhere the signs of human life are all too absent. Only the big gull moon shines down to watch, illuminate.
The bitch hangs her head in his lap, obediently restive. Coakes runs a hand over her bonnie fur, the coat as slick and soft as hairless inner thigh. He strikes up a rhythm, each soothing stroke a drag from a smooth cigaretto. The hard comes, unbidden, but welcome all the same. He releases it gently, careful not to wake her, lays back, fondling the tubby shaft. Eyes on the moon, head cold on the flat stiff granite, he strokes them both, picturing the painted swollen television faces. Her tongue is unexpected too, a flat and gentle friend, pillow soft against the salt lick of his balls. He pictures Juliet, Missy, Melody, girls he has known and loved and lost as the beast lips the thirsty plunger of his nob. He pulls back, suddenly fearful of the teeth, and she mounts him, dominant and lapping, tight snatch strange and cozy on his prick. Drained almost immediately, Coakes lurks inside the bitch, her pleading grinds against his soft, awkwardly familiar.
“Women,” he thinks, disgusted, and heaves the dog out, off him, into space.

Familiar acts are beautiful through love

Shelly, Prometheus Unbound

Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples, for I am sick of love

God, Song of Solomon

Numb gobbed and hung over, Coakes is crabby. The Rubrics are freezing this morning. The first frost has settled in, crusting his window pane with a thin murky wet. He walks down to the cricket pitch, watches finches fight the cold. Hidden in an old overcoat and a woman’s charmeuse scarf, he wanders the campus dodging the jogging scholars and hooting delivery vans.

Coakes felt his muscles tighten involuntarily against the chill. It was damp and cool, specks of frost floating in the faces of glistening puddles, gilded leaves startling in the ice bright European morning. He sat in the rose garden and took long slow draws on his musty pipe. He felt his age, the two day old hangover sandpapering his eyelids, the deep ache of night chilled bones - but he was satisfied, a grim satisfaction. For a moment he visualised kids snapping around his feet. Moon faced princes in their winter woolies; their pretty auburn haired mother, rosy and demure in United Colours of Beniton. Could he love again?

The sky was a blue grey slate cut through with shards of golden light. A girl approached. Coakes watched her as she crossed the grass. Her name was Stephanie, he decided. She was an undergraduate, an erasmus student from Bordeaux. She looked like Charlotte Gainsbourg.

See him there, great breast thrust against the cold. His hair, magnificent. Who could he be? His face, familiar, but why? A great violinist perhaps, or some Titan of German cinema. So ugly, that proud pockmarked maw, that great beak, and yet so solid, so powerful. I sense the epic in him, and approach.

‘Good day sir, is this seat taken?’
Coakes met the girls gaze. She was gaunt and pretty, one hand shading her eyes. Her pups were fiendish, squeezed and ripening under an azure sweater.
‘You’re not a reporter I hope?’ Coakes smiled, she clearly wasn’t, but now she’d know, if she hadn’t before, just what manner of man she was dealing with. The girl laughed, covering her mouth like a Japanese, and shook her head.
‘Well, sit then damn it.’
Coakes felt the garden draw in a little, the sky shrink to a ceiling.

Christ how the muscles move beneath his coat. He must be forty, but…so strong. Those arms could knock through solid oak. Can he feel me watching?

The girl looked away, and Coakes relaxed a little.

She can tell I’m money. Probably too classy to thieve my wallet from the night stand, but she’d get it somehow.

She took his hand, and he stiffened.
‘Look…a kingfisher I think. I did not know they flew here.’
Coakes watched her face again, took measure of that slender neck, those pine green eyes.
‘You’re a stranger here too I think, Australian is it?’
The girl laughed again, a charming sound, like sheets of rain through a forest canopy. She had still not let his hand go.

So resonant, so strong his voice. He is a Yank I think, but civilised, perhaps an artist. A brute, to be sure, but tempered by a tender soul. Buckowski in Armani.

‘Ah no, I am from le Gascogne. Stephanie Brun at your service.’
‘Very pleased to meet you Miss Stephanie. My name…’, he paused, savouring the words, ‘is Iago Coakes’.
She nodded, no flicker of recognition visible. Was it possible?
‘I regret…It seems that, perhaps that I should know… You seem disappointed.’

I smell him, damp and musky from the night, his eyes so gentle, piercing my cement garden. Christ how he reminds me of my father.

Coakes grunted. ‘Nonsense, it’s a relief not to be bothered by the pressures of expectation. No doubt you’ve heard of me, and are too embarrassed to admit it.’ He pulled his hand away, and the girl tilted her head as though puzzled.

Where’s the fucking camera? Either a gold digger or a blackmailing cunt, it has to be. Somewhere there’s a boyfriend with a digicam, and the bitch is doubtless underage.

‘Have you been in Ireland long Stephanie?’
She didn’t answer, but instead flopped down onto the bench, her feet straight out before her, and reached into her trousers, mans pants Coakes noticed, retrieving a lighter and cigarettes.
‘It’s so boring, don’t you think, to know such details?’
Coakes felt his balls retract. His teeth were painful, tingling and gritty from the antidepressants. A gust caught his hat and it rose straight off his head, as in a silent comedy, and settled once again, quick and gentle, and a little askew. Coakes took the hat into his hands, and they both examined it, started.
‘Coffee?’ He shook his head. ‘If we can find a decent cup in this Fenian backwater.’
‘Certainement.’

The tea shop is caked with wood inside. A little dank, but dreamy with the oaky hiss of cafe au lait. Coakes watches the girl from behind his coffee. She is clumsy but lucky, wildly swinging her mug as she speaks, banging it on the sturdy table to emphasise her points, somehow never shattering the ceramic.

He is bored. I’m boring him. He is grumpish and improper, doubtless a genius, and I’m boring him. And in a minute I shall start to speak of dire boys and scare or kinky bedrooms and scandalise. He has had, perhaps I think, not a life so full of experience. He is so guarded, so innocent.

Coakes fooled with his pockets under the table, and listened to her speak of home. Of parents, sweet but dull, the fire of their youth faded to middle class convention, of her radical brother battling capitalism in Madrid and Genoa. Coakes despised hippies, gaunt throwbacks to the dark dreams of socialism, huddled wretched in drum circles, scraggy beards terrifying in the weak light of their failing camp fires. He kept his thoughts to himself, asking only the most gentle questions he call to mind.

‘Tell me Stephanie, do you like to be fucked?’

She looked away, running a hand through her kinky, shoulder length hair.

‘The pleasure of a woman is a kind of magic spell; it demands complete abandon; if words or movements oppose the magic of caresses, the spell is broken.’

Coakes gripped his thighs unsteadily under the table. She turned to him, her gaze hidden behind that wild brunette tussle, and seemed to emerge slowly from the veil, grinning wickedly.

‘Why Mr. Coakes, I’ve scandalised you.’

Coakes submerged into his black coffee. When he broke the surface, scalded and panting, she was waiting for him, flicking at his nose with a mitten.

They walked the old Georgian streets side by side, fingers touching accidentally. Coakes barked a faux historic commentary, garbling eras, bumbling chimeric literary figures from half remembered History Channel biopics.

How he mocks his ignorance. So wry, so deprecating. He is I think, a baron of some vile industry, ashamed under the brusque impression of contempt.

They kissed beneath an old elm tree on the Rathmines road, and she left him, cradling a cold coffee, his long blonde hair tied neatly, his great chin hard.

Coakes began his woo, as he began everything, with extravagant aggression. He followed her everywhere, unspeaking, menacingly sexual. When he discovered Damien Hurst was her favourite YBA, he began to leave little gifts, pickled and sawn in half at the foot of her bed. Coakes saw to it he faced little competition, for weeks every man she spoke to found himself gagged, hogtied, and violated in a Saudi prison. Finally it worked, as it had to. Stephanie sensed him waiting for her, breathing heavily in the dark outside her window. She took his hand.

‘You have charmed me Mr. Coakes.’
‘And you me, my darling Stephanie.’

Coakes took her home to Gascony, to Bagnères-de-Luchon. He sat in the low roofed farm cottage and ate home baked Brioche and Entrecote, while her father regaled them with tales of Paris ‘68, and her much younger mother poured wine and flirted outrageously. They rode bicycles under the bare lime trees of the Allées d’Étigny, and bathed in sulphurous caves deep beneath the snow peaked pistes of Superbagnères. Coakes even picked up a few phrases en francais, and haggled with the merchants in the Allee de Etigny flea market, kicking over a fruit stall drunk on Cotes Saint-Mont. Coakes felt as though he had fallen from the sky into a Google map, lifted a new life from the pages of a story book. His training suffered as his palette expanded, Stephanie joking that he would soon resemble a middle aged Jim Morrison.

As they walked the foothills above Bagnères, Coakes wiped his brow and watched Stephanie’s petite behind. It had been almost three months since their first meeting, yet they had never once made love. At the farm, to the general hilarity of all, they slept in separate rooms. Each time she’d broached the subject he’d changed it, defensively boisterous.

Look at that arse, sweet Zeus the peaches, and the gruff screamer between them, guffing quietly as we climb. How my tongue could pummel her. But she’s too young, too innocent. Dear Satan, what am I doing here?

Coakes paused, planted his hiking pole in the rocky earth and looked down over the great ice age valley. Stephanie joined him, wrapping herself about the barrel chest, slipping her head under his crook of his arm, her cheek pressed against the rough brickwork of his jaw.

That evening the call came, Coakes’ summons back to Trinity. Questions had been raised in Nature about the quality of his research. Rumours on the net suggested an illicit arrangement with Dawkins, who’d been discovered floating, hanged and daubed in Wildebeest, off the Galapagos. Coakes took the first flight out of Bordeaux, settled back into his icy rooms, throwing himself into the shower, scrubbing off the sweat of the journey. In the mirror, his eyes were hollow. When he emerged from the bathroom, there was a message on his answering machine.

‘Iago, it is stupid, all these lies. I miss you, I’m coming over.’
Coakes slept better that night than he had in years.

Coakes took Stephanie to Acquisition, a hip bar he knew which served cocktails at five euro a pop. Half way through his fifth Atomic Dog, as the Pet Shop Boys struck up the opening chords of ‘You were always on my mind’, he began his confession. Nuzzling in a darkened cubby, he whspered terrible secrets one after another. An hour in, she shook her head and hushed him.
‘Iago, Iago, it’s OK, I understand.’
Coakes’ face was streaked with snot. His eyes bulged huge and lacy with veins.
‘I’ve never told anyone…’
‘That story about the Scalextrix?’
He put put his head between his hands and began to weep openly. ‘How was I suppose to race… one bloody car?’
In bed, he craddled her, whispering, ‘Et je n’ai plus songé. Qu’à te couvrir de feuilles. De mains nues et de feuilles. Pour que tu n’aies point froid.’
They tore at each other, Stephanie tugging Coakes’ cotton shirt off over his head, her lips eager, lapping at his neck, Coakes’ hands gentle under her blouse. A rustle and snap and she was naked, and purring, coquettish, shameless and giggling in the dim gold from their antique candle flame.
‘Come to me Iago.’
Hands shaking, he untied his pony tail, hair tumbling about his shoulders, vivid yellow in the crowning dark. He paused at his trousers, slipped his fingers inside her instead, kissed her deeply as she squealed in French, kicking her legs into the air.
He tugged and pummelled at her with his fingers, till she pulled away and moved her hands down to his pants, kissing his bare and sweaty chest.
‘There’s something I should…’
‘Hush,’ she’d stripped him to his boxers, retro baggy numbers, racing green turned septic in the dark. Coakes lay back panting as Stephanie rose above him, a flickering silhouette, lowered her eyes to remove his pants. Froze, groped about in the space between his legs, puzzled.

Christ no, the cock, the tiny tiny cock, how could she ever love it, how could she bare to touch that crippled, ugly knot.

Coakes choked with shame, a warbling fragile sound, raised up on his shoulders, pressed himself desperately to her chest.
‘It’s ok,’ she whispered, pushing his ludicrous soft between her legs, his tears forming a cool river down her chest as he suckled her breasts.
‘You have a scar down here.’
Coakes sniffed, raising his face from the soppy tits.
‘An accident, a long time ago. Could, could you suck it a while?’
‘Certainement,’ she replied awkwardly, climbing down him, kissing tenderly, as he dried his face on the cheap hotel’s dirty pillows.
The moment when her lips touched his unresponsive prick was lost in the numbing pool of her vaginal juices. He groped at Stephanie’s damp hair futily and thought of his lost love, her lips of salty sea and rotting gull. Hours drifted by in the bleak of night, Coakes moaning in a vain imitation of pleasure, Stephanie lapping and tugging heroically, her lips chapped and peeling, her eyes dead.

In the morning, they lay awake, side by side, unspeaking. Coakes raised a hand to her chest, fooled with one cold and unresponsive nipple. After a moment she turned her back to him, the sine wave curve of her bottom, perfect in the reddening dawn. Coakes wrapped himself around her, one hand under the smooth hard belly, another tussling her hair.

‘I have to go.’ The words were brittle, distant.

Coakes watched her dress, her back to him, each action careful, hands straightening and tightening. At the door she turned.

Look at him. That pig, naked and oily. How dank, how old he is.

‘This was mistake, I think.’

They never spoke again.

Justice moved my lofty maker: the divine Power, the supreme Wisdom and the primal Love made me. Before me were no things created, unless eternal, and I eternal last. Leave every hope, ye who enter!

Vangelis album title

If Greece had taught Coakes anything, it was that he could revolutionise a domain of human knowledge with little effort or prior experience. With this in mind, he sought and quickly obtained a research position at one of Europe’s leading universities. As he crossed the Atlantic on O’Reilly’s gulf stream jet, Coakes worked furiously on his plans for the language. English, he had always thought, would be far more successful as a natural science. Enough of this rusty liberal twaddle of meaning, scansion and post colonialism; the time was ripe to apply rigorous methodology, Poperian falsification and hypothesis testing. English was ready for a Kuhnian paradigm shift of Ozimandian proportions. Fuck the panting soliloquy’s of Hamlet, the drawing room melodrama of the Bronte’s, the bleak neurotic cynicism of Kafka. Literature was dead, and in it’s place Coakes would build his Litrology.

Settled into rooms in Trinity’s historic Rubrics, Coakes began work on his device. Without a unit of measurement, how could you have a science? Yet, without a measuring instrument, how could such a unit be recorded? Hidden in the unclean trove of English prose there lurked the hard accountable elements of meaning, the dark materials of truth, and Coakes must be the first to find them. Huddled over his work bench, demonically intense and heroically inspired, Coakes busied himself with solder and clever bits of metal. He built a box and into it placed the ashes of a first edition king James bible, fragments of Chaucer’s favourite pipe, and Cecilia Ahern. Cementing this electromagic tabernacle with the grease of Marlow’s masonic wig, Coakes carved a powerful sigil on it’s lid, activating his creation in the manner of the great magician Richard James. Half alchemy, one quarter science, three sevenths lunacy and a pinch of divelment, the device was finished. Lean in its carved oak case the ironotrom sat, ready to detect the basic unit of satire, the eyre-on.

The Graduate Memorial Building stank of unwashed student and hippy fumes. Coakes lay backstage, furiously hyperventilating into an emptied packet of Werther’s Originals. It was unlike the new Iago to panic. Unlike his rippling chest to cramp with fear. Unlike that heavy set mouth to chafe and flex with acid mothballs. Coakes was certain his invention was a masterpiece, but what if.. What if he was cast from the academy amidst scornful laughter? What if some toad, some lesser mind claimed precedence and shared his Nobel prize? What if the unending stream of thin stinging diarrhoea from the Werther’s continued, and Coakes was forced to mount the stage like a stinking jilted astronaut; worry hard cramping his walk, dry tongue tearing at his crusting lips.
Blaring in the background, a Funk Polk soundtrack rose to untold heights, pounding and swooshing, odd off kilter grunts catching in his chest, making him heave. Outside the gathered academics, students and dignitaries began to raise a chant; gentle at first then louder. ‘Iago, Iago, Iago..’, it’s backing vocals the whiny of damp panties flappering through the air. The whiff of excited beef was overpowering even here, backstage. Coakes stood and roared. Ripping open his Cassette Playa disco baby tee, he stared at his body in the full length theatrical mirror. There was nothing to fear, he was magnificent. As ‘The final countdown’ blasted over the tannoy, Coakes mounted the stage. Naked from the waist up, his Fabio jaw framed in drifts of ice blond hair, leather pants oiled and squeekless, he pounded to the lectern.
‘People of Europe, are you ready!’

The crowd hooted furiously. A man fainted in the back and there was a brief flurry as medics failed to revive him. Coakes pulled a velvet chord and the audience gasped. Before him six oval trap doors opened, and three identical cages, each veiled behind a thick cashmere curtain, rose from beneath the stage. As the crowd quieted, Coakes spoke softly into his headset mic. ‘Would Richard Dawkins please approach the stage?’

The lights dimmed and a prearranged drum roll picked up. Coakes began a clap that quickly spread throughout the room. With a judder, the ceiling above the audience spit open, and the floors above it folded neatly away, revealing the star pierced dark of evening, Dawkins great dirigible gradually descending, Dawkins alone at the helm, his great black cloak obscuring the night, the lip of the dread balloon above it, growing ever larger. Vangelis, seated in the rigging, surrounded by a wealth of nobs and keyboards, arms torn from Jean Michel Jarre, pulsing with talent, rising from his chest and legs - everywhere there was a space - numerous fingers pecking a synthetic symphony, feet naked, toes articulate as fingers directing multicoloured lasers that picked out Dawkins in the drawing dark, his dash of white hair tussled and splendid, grabbing a firm rope and tossing anchor, fixing the great Zeppelin, descending with ape like agility, Occam’s Razor between his teeth.

Dawkins strode purposefully toward the stage, briefly embraced Coakes, and turned to the audience, his blade brandished. Coakes spoke up, raising their twinned fists above his head. ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, I present the foremost scientist of the human race, one of Time magazines one hundred most influential people, 2007, the chair of the public understanding of science at Oxford University, and my favourite atheist, Clinton Richard Dawkins’.

The crowd surged forward, an octopus of fingers tingling toward Dawkins, tongues and eyes twitching with respect. Coakes signalled for his roadies to drive them back, and the pit ignited with the sparkle of a hundred taser bolts. Dawkins mounted the lectern, owlish countenance peering into the dark, paper thin lips tight stretched back in a magnificent smug. As he spoke, he swooshed his razor in dramatic flourishes, literally tearing through delusion and falsehood, a tatter of lies and weak arguments falling about him, snowing the stage with the soft lambswool of ignorance.

‘Several weeks ago my esteemed friend, my fellow jihadist in the battle against the seething tides of ignorance, Iago Coakes, contacted my henchfolk at the Dawkins Institute for the Advancement of Proper Wisdom. Dr Coakes had a proposal, not merely for a radical new paradigm of linguistic research, but an empirically verifiable methodology for entrenching English where it belongs, as the purview of science. Today, Dr Coakes proposes a great step toward a reasoned firmament of meaning, a death to the vague dalliances of hermeneutics. My associate Vangelis..’ at the mention of his name the maestro volleyed forth a melodic wave of resonance, blinding an ancient etymology fellow, and fusing twin foetuses hanging in the belly of a student, to a single, faceless, double arsed frightbaby, who would later survive heroic attempts at abortion. ‘..and I, shall act as objective measuring devices. It is our post-sacred duty to insure that Dr Coakes theory meets with the rigorous standards of modern empiricism.’

At this, Dawkins leapt from his podium, speaking unamplified to the audience, now quieted by Coakes brutes to a respectful silence. ‘Behold the test!’ He pointed toward the curtained cages, each motionless, yet poised with demonic energy. ‘In these boxes has been placed,’ Dawkins continued, tugging at each curtain in turn, ‘a beast, an element, or creation of man. Each subject being possessed of tremendous irony, or none.’ Dawkins smiled his famously condescending smile. ‘Professor Coakes has at no time had access to the mystery these cages contain.’ Coakes nodded warily, and set to tending his machine. With a deep intake of breath he approached the first cage - the ironotrom alive in his hands, nobs twirling, ornate dials dancing. The crowd grew deathly silent, save for the sussurous of the assembled legion, junior members of the philosophical and historical societies, suckling greedily at the arses of their seniors. Coakes glanced at the readout - met Dawkins gaze, two steel trap minds conjoined in mutual admiration.

‘It is ironic,’ he whispered.
With a flourish Dawkins pulled a fine, pink-hearted Conch from his cloak and issued a bellow from its depths. Vangelis’s lasers focused all their might on a single rope which burst into a fine blue flame, withering visibly as began his acclaimed Chariots of Fire theme. The rope burnt through, and the curtain fell in dreamy slowness, as though through a pail of American cheese, revealing at last the cages contents.
‘Behold,’ said Dawkins, the subtle shrill of his received pronunciation igniting unspeakable vibrations inside the female members of the audience. At the cages centre was a tiny old man, sprouted with tufts of rough white hair, hogtied, naked and utterly humble under the harsh video lights.
‘It is Iago’s 2nd grade English teacher, whose constant derision and mockery set Dr Coakes upon the path to todays invention - observe how his very humiliation serves as the first evidence of Coakes genius. How tremendously ironic!’
The crowd roared and Coakes fisted the air a single time, modestly. He moved to the next cage, his machine belching sulphurous puffs of fume, his eyes twin specks of star stuff, caught in a head that seemed hewn from marble. Once more the crowd grew quiet.
‘It is..’ he paused dramatically, ‘not ironic.’
Once more sky-fire spewed forth from Vangelis’s light cannons, once more a curtain fell.
‘It appears,’ said Dawkins vaulting to the top of the cage, hanging his head through it’s bars to address the audience upside down. ‘to be empty.’
He gazed about the cage, great beak sniffing enigmatically. ‘And yet somehow, full.’
Dawkins rose again, straddling the cage like some groteque Victorian stripper, his jodhpurs bulging, the great blade held out in one hand.
‘For this cage holds a reification so magnificent as to be invisible. Something utterly without irony. Look closely, I present, taken live from the nineteen seventy four ‘Lamb Lies Down On Broadway’ world tour, Phil Colins’ musical talent.’

Drawing the nothing up on a tiny pail, Dawkins sniffed the strange object and, lifting it from the bucket, held it out before him. ‘Ladies and gentleman, allow me to present our very special guest. Taking a break from the filming of his eighth annual season of ‘Futile Celebrity Jape’ in the bleak dark of the arctic tundra, Philip David Charles Collins!’ As he spoke, and Vangelis stroked the opening bars from In the Air Tonight, Colins emerged from the wings astride an orange space hopper, bounding with surprising vigour to meet Coakes. Old friends, they exchanged a lengthy and intricate handshake, before air kissing one another’s cheeks.
Dawkins tossed Colins the filthy gloam of ability, and he caught it just as dexterously between clenched teeth.
Slipping it on over his pantaloons like a treasured friend, Colins whispered a few quiet words of support to Iago, and mounting his air filled steed, bounded off into the wings. ‘And now,’ said Dawkins’ climbing a series of steps which flared into neon life as he approached the final cage, ‘Dr Coakes must face his final challenge. Inside this cage is either one of the most, or least, ironic specimens available in all the natural world.’ Dawkins hung his head and bellowed into his emerald microphone. ‘Iago Coakes will now attempt the final challenge.’
The crowd screamed as one, outside vast stadium monitors relaying the action to the assembled thousands and via satellite to every television amd radio station throughout the world. Through it’s open roof the building shook to the moshing feet of the audience hard pressed against faux ancient walls.

Coakes, a slight shake in his device the only betrayal of his complete external calm, approached the final curtain, his back to the audience, making small adjustments to his machine, his golden locks bound back in a splendid three foot ponytail. He span to face the crowd, eyes triumphant. ‘It is ironic!’
Dawkins too addressed the mob, his voice somber, his face saddened.
‘My friends gathered here tonight, and you the audience at home. Sometimes we must make grave sacrifices in the name of science, few as tremendous I’ll warrant, as that I make today. Vangelis shall not cut this chord,’ (at this, the subtlest toot of protest from the maestro) ‘no my friends, it is I who must birth this monstrous truth. Behold!’

Solemnly, Dawkins strode to the cage and placed a great ladder upon it’s curtained flank. Climbing slowly he reached the peak of the great dome in scarcely a minute, and under the breath of stars and silence, took his great razor from its exotic matter sheath, and with a single thrust, severed the rope with it’s plank length edge. The curtain fell a final time, as every television in the world glared Coakes face, picture in picture, top right corner on the falling curtain. Exposed, the hunk of meat guffed forth a stank of fester and corruption. Those present in the great hall vomited as one, Coakes, Dawkins and Vangelis included, and for a moment the sky was whited out with a mist of fume. Gradually the night air drained the rotting meat of it’s venom, and Dawkins spoke, wiping a slick of yellow vomit from his chin with a small confederate kerchief. He voice was low and ponderous, as in a creationist educational film.

‘Searching for decades in the frozen tundra, my college Van Dankin, in hopes of discovering an alien host that birthed the human race, found not that secret but another, something so wonderous and terrible as to shame the world for having lost it. Ice cold, she lay preserved for twenty decades, hidden by Templars, sought by kings. Here she rests, or part of her, the proof of my folly at the very moment of its culmination! Professor Coakes has been asked thrice and thrice he has been right, alas! What could be more ironic than I, Clinton Richard Dawkins, emertus professor for the public understanding of science at Oxford university, presenting you with this, the rotting but unbroken’, at this his voice quivvered, ‘hymen of the holy mother, the Blessed Virgin’s untouched sweet meat, alas still whole after the birth of Jesus and his twelve holy siblings!’ Dawkins, shaking his great wise head, drew out his blade and fell upon it in silence. As he expired, his clothes, hair and face burst into flames, then he was gone, leaving nothing, not even ash.

Coakes victory party was the stuff of legend, carried from the GMB on the shoulders of thousands, a sea of hands and faces, incomprehensibly wide and generous; later he would watch helicopter footage of the event, awed, hear the announcer note in his placid unperturbable Irish way, that it had been the largest assembly in the nations history, dwarfing the pope’s visit, five and a half million thronging the streets of Dublin, Trinity’s security shuffled aide, their tiny futile vans and mock police uniforms useless against the encroaching mob. They’d carried him to Lillies Bordello, somehow it had seemed appropriate. Bono, Friday and the regulars had been watching on the big screen, had greeted him lined up, and one by one, as though he were a head of state. Coakes floated through the evening, the coke and cocktails, fending advances from dwarvish pop producers and trying, somehow, to catch his bearings. He’d ended at a house party in Killiney, the Irish Hamptons; reading a Corr his poetry from a tattered Moleskine notebook, crying as he pressed his head against her titless chest and she tugged desperately at his unresponsive prick. Finally, Coakes was happy.

Other Chapters

Everywhere I go I find that a poet has been there before me.

Freud

Would that the people had but one neck!

Suetonius, Life of Caligula

Coakes stood on the gangway, looking out over the sweltered tarmac of LAX. He took a deep breath, and another, tasting the fumes and pollution. The people behind him, waiting to disembark and see loved ones after the long flight back from Europe, started to make discontented noises but Coakes didn’t care. He hefted the thin, some what frayed, laptop case and walked slowly down the steps. His hair was tied back in a tight pony tail and you, if you cared to look, could make out the clear definition of his cheek bones. There was a wickedness in his eyes. Coakes was home.

Waiting at the foot of the stairs was a Hot Pink Cadillac, some monster from the 1950’s. Good, his publisher had come through, as well he might. Greece had changed Coakes. Made him whole again, added to him a bit, maybe. Ever since that moustachioed prick of a waiter had raped him, well, the world owed Iago Coakes, and he was going to get everything that was coming to him.

Coakes and Baseman met up at Baseman’s place. It was a large mansion, a huge mock post-rococo leviathan of a building, swirls of pink marble and monolithic columns wrestling for supremacy on the riotous façade. In the centre sat a pair of vast doors, brass bound and burning gold in the pale Californian sun. Baseman was standing out front, leaning against a pillar, wearing his Toby suit. Coakes’ Hot Pink Cadillac, top down, music up, roared up the avenue, past rows of poplar trees, and came to a dramatic stop in front of the house. Baseman smiled his smile, the permanent shiteating grin of the conman, and popped the costumes head on. The massive black and white cat toy thing climbed into the Caddy, and Coakes put his foot down, spraying the front of the building with marble gravel.

“For fuck sake, Coakes, watch the house”, the massive head spake.

“Shut up Baseman, how did you afford that place? You can’t be making real money, aside from what you’re charging me.” Baseman had recently taken on the unenviable task of counselling Coakes’s.

“Well, I don’t actually live in there…”

The chrome pink monster powered down Santa Monica Boulevard, towards the Lighthouse. French dance music by Sebastian and Kavinsky blared loud and obnoxious, totally unlistenable.

“Why the hell did I meet you by someone else’s house?”

“No it belongs to me, only, it isn’t a house. I live in a trailer behind it. Its a façade. You know, part of the image..”

“Well its fucking impressive none the less. I’d like to show it to Bill-O one day. He’d shit his ring red.”

Behind the cat mask Baseman laughed. It was an eerie sound. Genuine. The Cadillac sped on, past lines of traffic, powering along the pavement, causing people to jump out of the way, to swear, but Coakes didn’t give a fuck, he was out driving with Toby, who knew all his secrets and loved him, and his money anyway. Up ahead, silhouetted white against the pinking sky, the Lighthouse, then a lighthouse, now a restaurant called the Lighthouse, grew large as they neared.

“Baseman, you’re fucking priceless”, he said, out of nowhere.

“No Coakes, I’m not. That’s the point, I’m always for sale”.

The hot pink Caddy pulled into the carpark, and Coakes, his long blond hair smoothed back, and a white cotton jacket, shirtless to best show off his golden toned chest, vaulted out athletically. Baseman, in his vast sweaty Toby suit climbed out slower, but no less dramatically, a vast cartoon cat thing, with red fez and huge phallic nose. They walked in, arm in arm. Baseman had made the reservations under Christian Bale’s name, and did the talking. The maitre d’ was nonplussed by Coakes casual arrogance, but soon relented, thoroughly unnerved by a mad giant toy silently mincing Queensbury Rules like Bert Lehr’s cowardly lion. Furries were so common now in LA, it could be Pitt in there, or Geffin, hell, it could be anyone. Coakes ordered a bucket of shrimp, Baseman the heroine.

Over dinner, Baseman set out his position. It was what Coakes was paying to hear, Baseman’s expert topic, Objectivism. It hung fat and heavy in the air, like a trapezists balls. Baseman had been head of the Ayn Rand Institute in Northern California, before realising it was in his rational self interest to make great big truck loads of money. So he’d quit and become Toby, the absurd cat-thing that sat opposite Coakes today. A conman all his life, Baseman had taken upon the characteristics of the clichéd homosexual, the camp voice, the effete mannerisms and all, to get closer to women, so he could fuck them, with his penis. He had mass produced his twisted little Toby dolls, the Dunnys made by others ‘far more talented’, selling them for obscene money, building an absurdest narrative around his creation, painting twisted landscapes and preadolescent hypersexualised girls, all of them named after his first babysitter, each birthing Toby, eating Toby, fucking Toby. Even the unsettling darkness was fake, another façade, like the mansion front, like the huge black and white suit, designed to disarm on a general level by giving an obvious target of which to be weary. One side effect was that Baseman had become literally two dimensional. Coakes marvelled at this Machiavellian brilliance, his wide eyed willingness to lie and cheat for money.

“You see Iago,” said Baseman, over his third misty Pimms No.1 on the rocks, “We humans interact directly with pervasive reality. We do not shake in impotent fury at the shades of dreams, as that cunt Kant might have you believe. We as rational objective actors, must live for our self interest, anything else is madness”. Taking a great huff of powdered heroin, absorbing it somehow through the distended nose of his suit, Baseman continued. “Twenty years ago I was nothing - giving to others, worrying about the opinions of looters and moochers. I tried everything to fill my empty life with booze and pussy - Christianity, Dianetics, Neuro Linguistic Programming. Now I possess a nice-sized Baseman organization creating really profitable films, TV, books, toys, and apparel. As the great lady herself said, happiness is the moral purpose of life, there is no morality which does not promote the selfish interest of the individual. It is by following our rational morality we rise above the animal, the socialist.”
At this Coakes’ face sunk, and he began to stir his Vodka Seven despondently. “Rising above the animal Gary? That sounds suspiciously Spartan”.
“Coakes my man”, said Baseman, leaning back in his Louis XIV chair, his suit pouring out over the sides, it’s face eearily static as Baseman carried on, stuffing paw fulls of foie gras entier into the mouth, where it hung for a moment then fell, pooling in his lap. “You’re missing the true beauty of objectivism. Each of us is a rational selfish actor. We each get to decide what makes us happy. Anything, anything at all.”

The night degenerated into the usual wildness, first at McDowells and then out in the desert, a tired edge to it all, now, for Coakes. Since returning from Greece, there was an oil of ennui covering everything. He hardly bothered to bring the little dictionary of sexual perversions with him. He’d done it all, now. Baseman was wild though, fully raving, pouring drugs into the nose of the suit, where a small, built in, electric element burned them as he breathed deep, freebasing whatever came his way. Halfway through the usual arguments with Arabian princes and blond, dead eyed Eastern European girls, Baseman lost the bottom of the suit, and ran bare arsed and paper thin round the basement, drug fug pouring out of the chimney red hat, a massive black and white cat-thing, weirding out the regulars, who frantically checked their pupils and blackberried their dealers, until he found the suits legs; they’d wondered off for a piss.

Coakes sat in his usual place, deep on the antique leather sofa, waving away the Mexican drug waitress, his hooka still filled with the patented McDowells Mix (1 eighth Afgan Gold hashish, 2 parts peyote, a hand full of Harribo gummy bears, a sprinkling of crystal meth and some Rajestani Saffron, for flavour), nearly untouched, as he spoke quietly to the owner. McDowell, once a reputed and infamous Irish politician, was a beast of a man, he appeared as though jellymolded out of canned ham, blotchy pink and deep set piggy eyes, nearly totally bald. He talked endlessly about the “old country”, and some sort of tiger he’d built, which had turned on him. He was clearly insane, but he owned the finest whore house in LA, and had an endless supply of drugs and girls. Only the finest. He looked up to see Baseman threaten some Saudi royal with his razor thin penis…

“I’ll cut your fucking face off! Fucking sand hoarder!”

The prince looked furious, his friends laughing at him behind their beards, and his hand was gripping the hilt of the curved dagger at his waist. He was simultaneously trying not to look at and keep an eye on Baseman’s cock, a long two dimentional cartoon threatening to slit his throat…

“The fuck is that guy”? asked McDowell, as Coakes took a long suck on the jelly drug mixture, bubbling great clouds of sugary red smoke through the Evian.

“That my friend, is the best amongst men. Its his first time here. Leave him be. Remember my first time?”

“Coakes, you evil fucker, I never want to remember that. Tucker Carlson is still banned because of that night”.

“Yeah, he wanted me to talk to you about that…”

“Fuck him, he can come and talk to me himself”.

By now, Baseman had wondered off, leaving the Saudi white with fury, his hand still clamped on the knife, as his friends, all young Arabs, laughed at him. McDowell went over to smooth the situation. Coakes stood and wondered to the corner bar. It was self service, and he grabbed a long neck beer, and cracked it open in Anna Nicole Smith’s mouth. She’d been plastinated and propped up on the bar, a triumph of Gunthers craft, adding a bit of celebrity magic to the joint when Bono wasn’t in. In the corner, Baseman was wailing on one of the young black poors McDowell had hoovered up after Katrina, plunging his huge smoking nose in and out of her, her eyes glossy and unfocused, a crowd of minor celebrities and politicians standing around, hollering and clapping…

Later, in the desert, Coakes burned the soiled Toby costume, tears forming in his eyes from the acrid smoke. He’d already folded Baseman away, securely, in his note book. Under the pile of flaming cat-thing shaped, black and white cotton and foam, the leg of an ex-prostitute, or perhaps an ex-Arab, poked out. It was Baseman’s first time at McDowells, so of course they’d murdered a subhuman and hidden it’s body in the cold blanket of night. Leaning on the trunk of his hot pink Cadillac, Coakes pulled his gloves back on and poked the leg deeper into the fire with a long stick. He placed the tip of one of the foul Russian no-filters he favoured at moments like this between his lips and crouched to light it from the bonfire. He’d come a long way. He hardly even shook any more when he did this. The deep grey brutality of the smoke hit the back of his throat and he smiled, sucking deep again. He couldn’t remember exactly what had happened, but the details were irrelevant. It was the worlds doing, not his. Coakes was totally without blame. No one would ever blame him again. It felt like home, out here in the desert, the crinkling of a bonfire, the high sweet smell of roasting meat, the cooling skin of the convertible, Bill-O’s voice trickling out of the stereo. “There is a liberal cancer in America today, and President Guilani is a cure for these far left loons, now…” Coakes loved how Bill-O pronounced Am-mare-icke-ah. America. Home of the rich and free, the brave and the selfish. Everyone was a king here, Coakes amongst them. They didn’t know his secrets, didn’t care about him, but he was a king. He warmed his hands on the fire, the desert chill enveloping him, as the last of the burning mass ceased to be recognisable. He took another deep drag of nicotine laden smoke, then threw the butt carefully into the fire. With gloved hands he sorted through the ashes, burying the big bones and skulls a further sixty yards into the dull grey sand. Coakes had been awake for eight days running. He took a breath of cold desert air, and loosed a fury of poetic greatness, scrawling rough words ten feet high into the crusty blood red sand.

‘How like a statesman or a clown
Sleep is, ridiculous
Sleep is a Charlie Chaplin prat fall into silence
How cheap a slut is sleep
How easily she comes, when
She is easily afforded
Sleep is a cellar door
Hung like a trap beneath a convicts feet
Sleep is a threat
A ninja in a cowl
Deep in a cave, slung
In a distant hill
sleeps a terrorist
With a wake up pill’.

He breathed easy. Once again he’d based his rhyme scheme and thematic concerns on early formal Lu shih T’ang era verse, emulating a high German shift with his plosive macrons, the poem speaking implicitly of man’s, any man’s, metaphorical wanderjahr. Valiantly he had avoided schema atticum, and mentioning recent traumatic events in the Mid East. ‘Events in which I had no part’, he found himself screaming into the night, tossing the stick to ricochet down the frosty bank of a gulley. Night was at its darkest, an hour or two before dawn, and he hurried back, a string of sweat darkening a patch between his shoulder blade of his cotton jacket, and he raked the ashes again, half burying them in sand before he carefully re-lit the bonfire, using an old tyre, some petrol, and a few bits of scrap wood, throwing cans around. He always carried these in his trunk, went out collecting them especially. Hobo’s had been here in the night, drinking, and if anyone cared to look, killing. He had only had one daughter. He was breathing quickly now, blood in his ears, Melody’s eyes on him in that cell, the thin whine of air conditioning, Schwarzenegger laughing for the cameras as he flicked the switch. The Governor had hung out afterwards, signing autographs and posing with the victims family. Coakes kept the framed autographed picture of the two of them together, mock checking her vital signs, in his bathroom. He smiled now, calmed enough to light another cigarette, to laugh again, to climb back into the car and pull away, out of the desert, leaving a cloud of sand heavy in the air, and a bum’s fire, as close as he’d felt to home in God knows, to drive back up the hills, to his house, past the ranting red eyed Nicholson, to his divine black window into god, to his television.

Other Chapters

Ah, dirrty (dirrty)
Filthy (filthy)
Nasty (ho), christina you nasty? (yeah)
Too dirrty to clean my act up
If you ain’t dirrty
You ain’t here to party (woo!)

Baby it’s brick city, you heard of that
We blessed, and hung low, like Bernie Mac
Dogs, let ‘em out, women, let ‘em in
It’s like I’m ODB, the way I’m freaking

Aguilera, Dirty

Coakes, past health problems surmounted, had become magnificent. He wore his hair in Princess Leia bangs and his pubise had been shaven into an intricate tribute to the artist formerly known as Prince. Coakes’ proud nipples were the talk of Broadway 11, and his rippling chest had been scanned by WETA for use in a planned King Kong sequel. Coakes’ face too had been restructured. Where swollen jowles had swung like nutless sacks beneath a furred snout, a Vincent Galleano chin held ‘Grin’ by Laura Ashley.
As his batsman Sushi knelt to groom his treasure trail with organic hummingbird wax, Coakes received a call on his iPhone. It was Aguilera.
‘Coakes you beast, I’m still aching after last nig