Geoff Nicholson - Bleeding London

A flight of half a dozen steps led up to a pair of heavy steel doors. Lawton rattled his keys in the lock and opened one of the doors for them to enter. They walked into a massive unlit space that Lawton gradually illuminated with a series of spotlights suspended on metal cords.

The place looked both infinitely worked on and strangely unfinished. The walls had long expanses of unpainted plaster and yet pictures had been hung. Elsewhere metal struts and steel frames had been gleefully exposed, but the wooden floor was new, blond, clean and frosted. A couple of black and white pony skins were laid out at opposite ends of the space and a series of furniture pieces had been arranged as though in an art gallery. The furniture was wild and ugly and looked like it had been bolted together from lumps of concrete, driftwood, glass and scrap metal. The glass had shatter patterns running through it. All the metal had dangerously sharp edges. There was nothing else: no carpets, no curtains, no upholstery, no softness.

“You live here?” Mick asked.

“Sometimes. It serves as a showroom too.”

“Yeah?”

“We sell the whole package, the apartment, the interior design, the furniture, the art.”

Mick stared at a strange metal hump at his feet and said, “Is that furniture or art?”

“It’s both,” Lawton said. “It’s a work of art that you happen to be able to sit on.”

Mick surveyed the space and couldn’t suppress a snigger.

“People really want to live like this?”

“Actually, yes,” Lawton said frostily.

“Only in London.”

“No, not only in London. Also in New York, Barcelona, Milan. Anyway, I suspect neither of us is here for a chat about international design.”

Mick nodded agreement and Lawton slapped his hands together to show he meant business. It turned out that the metal hump was a kind of chest. Lawton opened the hinged lid to show Mick the contents, and Mick looked down on a mad selection of sex toys.

They were mostly dildos in all varieties, in pink and black, in rubber and metal and wood, from the slenderly boyish to the truly monstrous. Some were realistic, if insanely exaggerated, attempts to model the human penis, complete with veins and sometimes even balls and retractable foreskins. Others were more abstract, more symbolic, in polished gold and silver. Some vibrated, some had studs and straps and rubber friction pads.

“With a little encouragement I can accommodate any of these,” Lawton said.

Mick looked at the largest of them, a gargantuan model with the girth of a beer can, and found himself impressed. He looked at the rest of the contents, at the butt plugs, dog collars, nipple clamps, whips, and a large tub of something called Sex Grease.

“After that I’m ready for anything,” Lawton said. “Fists, feet, anything that comes to hand really. You can use your imagination.”

He looked to Mick for some sort of reassurance or at least complicity. None was forthcoming and yet he found something encouraging in the solid, blank meanness of Mick’s face.

“I like a bit of chat too,” Lawton said. “You can call me any filthy name under the sun. But words are never quite enough. Sticks and stones. I have the capacity to take a great deal of punishment. And if I squeal a little, or even a lot, that doesn’t necessarily mean I’m having a bad time. But I don’t need to gabble on like this, do I? I can tell you understand.”

Having stated at least some of the rules he began to unzip his leather jacket. Mick could see he was wearing nothing underneath, but at first his chest was in shadow, the flesh obscured. Then he turned so that light fell across his body and Mick saw that the skin of his torso was scored with weals, bruises, fresh livid grazes, and what looked like cigarette burns. Lawton stood there, pleased with himself, showing himself off. Instinctively Mick looked away, and Lawton was pleased again with the reaction, pleased that he was able to shock.

“If you don’t like what you see,” he said, “you can always rearrange it.”

Mick considered the offer. Lawton unbelted his jeans and pushed them down his thighs to reveal more of the same, more traces of previous encounters, previous users, as though a diagram of sick desire had been doodled on his flesh, turned into a map of scarred skin and torched nerve endings, a city of delicious pain. Even his cock looked bruised and knocked about, stretched and raw.

He kicked off his jeans but left the leather jacket round his shoulders, stood a few moments in Mick’s gaze. To Mick’s alarm, though not exactly surprise, Lawton reached for the tub of Sex Grease and started lubricating himself in readiness. He was extremely thorough, and when he’d finished he made a move towards Mick. It was an odd move, somewhere between a lunge and an embrace. In any other circumstances Mick would have found nothing remotely threatening in the action. Lawton was a queasy, feeble thing, scarcely worthy of Mick’s attention, and yet Mick did now feel threatened and so he lashed out. He was aware that there was something weak and effete about the punch he delivered to Lawton’s face, something emasculated and unconsidered. Lawton felt it too. He stopped in his tracks and he stood still, not unappreciative of being hit, but nevertheless moved to say, “You can do it a lot harder than that, I hope.”

His words were meant to be provocative and taunting, and Mick was duly provoked. He punched Lawton again, in the stomach this time, and the punch was delivered with much more strength and focus. Lawton doubled up and sank to his knees. His face showed that he enjoyed the blow, but Mick didn’t like it at all. Now that he was confronted with someone who wanted to soak up his anger and aggression, he felt uncomfortable, unbalanced. Besides, more crucially, he was having a lot of trouble believing that Lawton had raped Gabby.

“Have you ever been married?” he asked.

Even through his pain Lawton found it a laughable question. “What do you think I am?”

Mick didn’t tell him. He said, “You ever had sex with a woman?”

“No. I’ve never put my cock in a tin of stale tuna fish either.”

“What a foul thing to say.”

Mick considered hitting him again but he couldn’t link up the right muscles and synapses to make it happen. He wondered what Judy would think if she could see him now. Might she be watching him again? Would she want him to hit Lawton for having insulted her sex? Or would she disapprove of hitting such an obvious weakling? Perhaps, he thought, conscience was no more than this, the simple feeling of being watched, by God or by a half-Japanese bookshop assistant, someone who will judge you, hold you responsible, who might think less of you if they believed you were doing the wrong thing.

“I think homosexuality’s really peculiar,” said Mick. “I mean I can just about understand that two blokes might fall in love. Love is blind, et cetera. It’s a sort of inexplicable, abstract thing, and I can see how it might make you fall for a bloke. And if it did then I can see how you might want to be with that bloke, and maybe live together. And I can see why you might share a bed, and I can see you might put your arms around each other. But I really can’t see why you would suddenly want to have things shoved up your anus.”

Lawton looked at him sourly.

“I mean, buggery’s a funny thing, isn’t it? Because some people would say that buggery degrades the person who gets buggered. And in that respect they might say it was like rape; the victim supposedly being the one who’s degraded. But I don’t think of it like that. The rapist is degraded just as much as the victim, and as far as I can see the one doing the buggering is humiliated every bit as much as the one being buggered.”