Written on the Body Read Free Page B

unthinkingly scale an erection, her mind filled with young romantics gazing over Paris and opening aerograms that said Je t’aime.
    We went to the Louvre to see a Renoir exhibition. Inge wore her guerilla cap and boots in case she should be mistaken for a tourist. She justified her ticket price as ‘political research’. ‘Look at those nudes,’ she said, although I needed no urging. ‘Bodies everywhere, naked, abused, exposed. Do you know how much those models were paid? Hardly the price of a baguette. I should rip the canvases from their frames and go to prison crying “Vive la resistance”.’
    Renoir’s nudes are not at all the world’s finest nudes, buteven so, when we came to his painting of La Boulangère, Inge wept. She said, ‘I hate it because it moves me.’ I didn’t say that thus are tyrants made, I said, ‘It’s not the painter, it’s the paint. Forget Renoir, hold on to the picture.’
    She said, ‘Don’t you know that Renoir claimed he painted with his penis?’
    ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘He did. When he died they found nothing between his balls but an old brush.’
    ‘You’re making it up.’
    Am I?
    Eventually we resolved Inge’s aesthetic crisis by taking her Semtex to a number of carefully chosen urinals. They were all concrete Nissan huts, absolutely ugly and clearly functionaries of the penis. She said I wasn’t fit to be an assistant in the fight towards a new matriarchy because I had QUALMS . This was a capital offence. Nevertheless, it wasn’t the terrorism that flung us apart, it was the pigeons …
    My job was to go into the urinals wearing one of Inge’s stockings over my head. That in itself might not have attracted much attention, men’s toilets are fairly liberal places, but then I had to warn the row of guys that they were in danger of having their balls blown off unless they left at once. A typical occasion would be to find five of them, cocks in hand, staring at the brown-streaked porcelain as though it were the Holy Grail. Why
do
men like doing everything together? I said (quoting Inge), ‘This urinal is a symbol of patriarchy and must be destroyed.’ Then (in my own voice), ‘My girlfriend has just wired up the Semtex, would you mind finishing off?’
    What would you do under the circumstances? Wouldn’t impending castration followed by certain death be enough to cause a normal man to wipe his dick and run for it? Theydidn’t. Over and over again they didn’t, just flicked the drops contemptuously and swapped tips about the racing. I’m a mild-mannered sort but I don’t like rudeness. On the job I found it helped to carry a gun.
    I pulled it out of the waistband of my RECYCLE shorts (yes I’ve had them a long time) and pointed the barrel at the nearest dangle. This caused a bit of a stir and one said, ‘You a loony or something?’ He said that but he zipped his flies and buzzed off. ‘Hands up
boys
,’ I said. ‘No, don’t touch it, it’ll have to dry in the wind.’
    At that moment I heard the opening bars of ‘Strangers in the Night’. It was Inge’s signal to say we had five minutes ready or not. I motioned my doubting John Thomases through the door and broke into a run. I had to get into the mobile burger-bar Inge used as a hide-out. I threw myself in beside her and looked back from between the bread rolls. It was a beautiful explosion. A splendid explosion, much too good for a load of demi-johns. We were alone on the edge of the world, terrorists fighting the good fight for a fairer society. I thought I loved her and then came the pigeons.
    She forbade me to telephone her. She said that telephones were for Receptionists, that is, women without status. I said, fine, I’ll write. Wrong, she said. The Postal Service was run by despots who exploited non-union labour. What were we to do? I didn’t want to live in Holland. She didn’t want to live in London. How could we communicate?
    Pigeons, she said.
    That is how I came to rent the attic