Ménage Read Free Page A

a fucking song by Abba. Why don’t you sell your soul and get some real work, like you really want to, then we could afford all your horrible bourgeois necessities.
    Stupidly, I ventured that he might also try to find work.
    — Jobs, my dear, are for those such as you, who are scared of a moment alone with one’s thoughts. Sustaining idleness is the most difficult vocation of all.
    Oh, how he loved to tease me about my little scraps of freelance writing for the
Hoxton Advertiser
– a hack from the Borough of Hackney, he called me. I was not proud of what I had to do to earn a crust and did not know how it came to pass that I paid for everything and was poorer than before. To this day I still have no idea how Saul had managed to stay on the dole for seven years, only hints. Something to do with faking a psychology test and his ‘affliction’. He was on invalidity benefit although he was able-bodied, or at least would have been if he for once tried to eat and didn’t smoke so much. He said Thatcher invented all these new benefits to bring down the unemployment figures, and even though he decried the welfare state and railed against scroungers and hypocrites, he nonetheless every second week cashed his giro as an invalid. He was, as he said, ‘gainfully unemployed’.
    I digress. I should be telling you about how I met Dot, but it is important for you to picture the mire she was just about to wade into.
    To resolve the crisis over flatmate and electric light, I, as a last attempt, proposed that we go to one of the gallery openings that night – there were many at that time. It was at Dazed and Confused and there would be wine to steal. Perhaps, I thought, if Saul got wasted enough he might help me clean up. Saul, shook his head – I could pinch sherry from Sadhi’s much more easily, he exclaimed, so I added the prospect of real toilet paper. While he had often insisted that my complaint over using newspapers for the purposes of anal cleansing was reactionary, I knew that he harboured a secret nostalgia for quality loo roll (‘Tabloids are smoother on the anus,’ he’d declared, ‘being cheaply made on thin, inferior paper, while
The Times
and
Guardian
do lead to chafing and occasional bleeding. Such is the burden of intelligence.’) That was it then: the promise of some pinched Kleenex and white wine had him motivated. As he got dressed I secretly searched my mind for a plan to leave him. I did not for a second really hope or believe that anyone would or could enter our lives and save us from ourselves, certainly not one such as Dot.
    Arseholes
was the name of the exhibition, and it was, quite unexpectedly, a series of eighteen high-gloss cibachromes, about a metre square, of human anuses in extreme, almost medical, close-up. (There was no way the
Hoxton Advertiser
would publish a review, which would leave me twenty quid short the next month.)
    I set about locating and stealing the wine bottles while Saul got to work distracting the masses.
    — Such a succinct sphincter, he pronounced as he gesticulated before a tight pink arsehole, — but my favourite is the one with hairy haemorrhoids, very Jackson Pollock!
    He soon had quite a circle round him. I located a hidden place beside the drinks table, with bottles well within reach. And so Saul stared ranting about Damien Hirst; how he’d first met him three years ago and told him: — Darling, you’re flogging a dead horse with this art of yours. Why don’t you just in fact exhibit one?
    The sheep and the cows in formaldehyde that then followed Saul claimed as his own, to rapturous laughter from the circle.
    — He has still to do a horse, though. I think he’s afraid I might sue.
    I grabbed two bottles while Saul went on. Pearls before swine, he muttered. Pearls before swine. As he threw back a glass of wine I heard him start his old favourite.
    — Did I ever tell you about the Duchess, he ranted, — the mistress of Duchamp? She once walked down Fifth Avenue