Friction Read Free Page B

on occasions of personal failure or moderate fatigue.
    Point one: ‘How, Johnny, can we inhabit a planet wherehalf the population is starving, and the other half is deliberately starving themselves?’
    Point two: ‘[Politician A] is only interested in creating a context in which [multinational corporation X] can successfully and safely establish factories in [poor country Y], the guy doesn’t give a fuck about human rights, just free fucking trade.’
    Point one is actually more of a question, albeit rhetorical, so as compensation here’s the usual extension of point two: ‘I’ll tell you something, Johnny, free trade has got nothing to do with freedom.’
    This more than constitutes profundity in many of man’s days and ages. Rebecca is to be applauded for her efforts.
    Clap. Clap. Clap. Clap.
    In Johnny’s eyes Rebecca is the vanguard of the proletariat, with an intimidating set of tits to match. She stretches out in the sun and his eyes roll like marbles down the mysterious contours of her body. He barely knows what a tit is. Can’t really imagine one, its consistency, its texture.
    â€˜When I graduate, I think I’d like to teach in a prison,’ says Rebecca, uprooting clumps of grass and placing them on the inch of flesh that is revealed between her shirt and her skirt. When I graduate I’d like to be that little clump of grass, thinks Johnny, like little green pubes. I’d like to be natural. I’d like to hide where your buttocks meet your thighs and not be found.
    â€˜Definitely,’ continues Rebecca, absently brushing away the grass, ‘I’d really like to work with sex offenders, get inside their heads.’
    Just as Johnny’s trying to work out what sexual offence he could commit so as to land Rebecca as his teacher, the sun disappears behind a cloud and a football bounces between the two of them and comes to rest. It becomes noticeablycolder. A wind blows. I’m not capable of rape, thinks Johnny. Can you go to prison for simply staring at girls?
    Johnny drifts off, wondering whether wolf-whistling is a sex crime. Rebecca looks to where the football came from and watches as a young man begins to jog in their direction. She smiles. It wouldn’t cross Johnny’s mind to kick the ball back. He couldn’t kick air.
    The jogging boy wears no top; his pectoral muscles jump fiercely up and down with every foot that hits the ground. Rebecca scans down his body to the neatly tensed six-pack, the seams of his perfectly baggy shorts, sharp shins flanked by calf, trainered feet, dancing laces. Rebecca gets a lurching feeling. A sense of being alive and a sense of being fooled.
    â€˜I feel sick,’ she says suddenly, ‘what’s that smell?’ Rebecca knows. She has smelt the danger, seen it in the lines that define the muscles of young men’s chests.
    â€˜I’ll never be a sex offender,’ says Johnny, noticing the football for the first time and wincing at its muddy, worn leather, at it horrendous kinetic potential. He sees the boy, too, and turns away.
    Rebecca doesn’t. Her eyes are on the football. It moved. Slightly. The seams that bind the pentagons of black and white leather begin to prise apart. Rebecca sits up. The football is mouthing something to her, trying to communicate, an expression of terrible fear on its kicked and muddied face. Thudding footsteps get louder. The boy arrives, the skin that binds his skeleton tensing and relaxing with his gasping mouth.
    â€˜Sorry,’ he says, addressing Rebecca. Johnny looks at the young man’s face and instinctively raises a hand to his own, running it across the bloody terrain of his cheeks. He returns his eyes to the ground, which he gouges with a stick.
    â€˜No problem,’ says Rebecca, rolling the ball towards the young man’s feet but not wishing to look at it, in case it starts talking again. She doesn’t wish to be warned or