Ménage Read Free

Sade, although what sexual mutilation had to do with nutrition I had yet to work out. My gut was aching from, perhaps, liver failure. I sneezed constantly from the spores and had to take Rennie and paracetamol to kill the side effects of the antihistamines. After paying for all the drugs, buying food was out of the question.
    When finally I plucked up the indignation to knock on his door, he opened it and struck a dandyish pose, as if he had been waiting all along.
    — Yes? What can I do for you?
    His appearance never failed to throw me: eyeliner, stubble poking through layers of foundation stretched into cracks around his mouth, high-street girl’s T-shirt, far too tight, which read ‘BABE’, army boots, bare legs and his kimono. That damned kimono. The way his dick would peek out from it occasionally, as if checking whether the coast was clear. The whole issue about sex was very confusing and I had lived those two years without it because every time I tried to pick up a girl he showed great disdain, muttering things like ‘Don’t forget – all they want is to steal your talent, and you have precious little of it to spare’. Naked bodies disgusted him, and as for sex, he said, ‘All that grunting and sweating, it’s like doing push-ups till you’re sick.’ No, I was convinced he was as asexual as he was amoral and our relationship was platonic (although I did once dream I let him sodomise me in exchange for him taking out the bin bags).
    He waited in his doorway for me to challenge him, his stereo blaring –
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
– as if claiming Nietzsche was on his side in the pending argument. His breath was already heavy with sickly sweet breakfast sherry.
    I was afraid of confronting the eviction issue too directly, so said, — We need to have a big talk, and I can’t if you insist on hitting the bottle before breakfast.
    He silently drew on the last strand of fag end, staring at the ground before venting his riposte.
    — Hitting? The bottle! As you may have noticed our penury has reduced us to drinking from boxes. And if anything is being hit it is me, by the poverty of your imagination!
    I knew what was coming.
    — Ungrateful peasant. My God, may He rest in peace, it was me that dragged you up . . .
    — I know, I know – from the proletarian slime . . . but if we’re going to be able to get a flatmate we need to clean the place and if we’re going to clean the place we need to buy light bulbs so we can at least see the extent of the horror.
    — Buy?
Buy
? Did you not know they invented a light bulb that lasted for a lifetime but the capitalist bastards decided it would put them out of business? I will not subsidise planned obsolescence! Go forth and procure some by the usual methods!
    I protested that I’d almost got caught red-handed last time. There were only so many times I could go to the pub’s pisser and replace their live bulb with our dead one. I proposed candles.
    — Candles are for hippies!
    — Well, if we went to sleep at a regular hour we could wake before it starts getting dark and clean up using daylight; it’s free by the way.
    — I have my best ideas at night. The dark suits me.
    I laid out the cost of light bulbs for him, seventy-five pence from Sadhi’s, sixty-five from Woolies.
    — Do you have sixty-five pence?
    I did not and told him so.
    — My God, may He rest in peace, but what happened to your dole cheque?
    And so I went though our weekly costs. Don Quixote and Golden Virginia, photocopying and pasta shells. I suggested we roll back the carpet and look for spare change, if not our own then from the previous occupants.
    — We did that last month. All is futile. I’m going back to bed.
    He did just that and pulled the covers over his head. It must have been 4 p.m.
    — For Christ’s sake, I protested, are you seriously telling me we’re going to be evicted just because you refuse to save up enough to buy a light bulb!
    — Money money money, you’re like