Fox Cock

The washing machine is a budget appliance and when it spins the whole flat shakes; spins like a lunatic, twelve-hundred RPM, enough to make a woman cum or piss a neighbour off. A minute is a mighty long time. In the kitchen, sharing some horizontal wooden slat with the beast, one rocks on their heels with marigolds in the soap or checking on how brown the toast is going. If the cupboard door opens, the washing machine propels a terrific sound at you; one has only to push the side of it, stroking almost, nurturing the detergent—‘Everything will be okay.’ It gets quieter, like an abused dog or a pinball machine.

There are many days when I feel like a speck, a none-too-interesting speck, and regard others just the same, and am so uninterested in their plight that I could sleep like a baby after watching the ten o’clock news and maybe feel like nothing at all in the world is really happening.

They scream in the night. For five nights, they screamed.

Of course I did not sleep well. My window is broken, never quite closed, a perpetual draught onto the bedsheets. At three in the morning, four, five, I would awake to the sounds outside: junkies shouting & moaning, youths going back & forth, the children sounded young so that I was not sure what was going on; a dog barked, two dogs; they row, they fight. I listen. Is it reality or just dreams? Many mornings I will wake up and wonder as such. No, far too vivid for dreams. The bed is cold, the draught and its fingers. (I roll over and see her words enough to make my eyes sting; the first exuberance from her two-hour time difference. How much longer?) Sunday morning foxes vacated bars and district line nightclubs to link up on the way home; that is what I hear on the sabbath at five-thirty. She is in pain as his barbs catch into the softness of her insides. I wonder, half-asleep, if she knew what she had in store? Was she a virgin, deflowered in front of the whole neighbourhood on a patch of grass next to the cardboard windows and broken-down cars? It really is something to hear her scream at that time of the day. She cries to get free so he uses his teeth and she screams louder, but it is what it is now; this is Attenborough territory. Maybe it won’t take him much longer. I listen and try not to. I don’t know what happens to his barbs after he cums, or if he even enjoys coming. I stare at the light that is beginning to grey. I get up — cover the mattress so the heat can’t escape — urinate and drink a glass of juice on the edge of the bed. If it were a weekday I’d still be asleep. The fox is maybe getting pregnant; I’m sure it’s all quite similar to humans.

At lunch I go for a walk, a little further than normal, like a tube of toothpaste. There is a man pacing back & forth in front of a building. It is an office building. In the foyer they used to have a fibreglass zebra, but the fibreglass zebra is gone now, and all that’s left is the man walking back & forth. Remember him from December — as I moved towards the family for Christmas tradition — and the small amount of belongings accrued. Still then he paced. Now he paces and the possessions mount like dead leaves. In amongst the lunchtime travels and the plants protected against winter, I watch him pace. He paces. You see him there? He paces. He traces the concept of infinity over a hubbub of home county comfort. I remember the fibreglass zebra. Where is he this moment? He takes the zebra to bed. The muscles of the male arm are most comforting. In the middle is a revolving door, on either side: plate-glass doors; two nooks for him to stack his possessions and the colours they all blend into one. I often check to see whether it will snow this winter.

Outside the toilet I am caught off-guard—‘Fancy a drink tonight?’ Hmm, I say, and he notes my apprehension, although neither of us understand it. ‘Or tomorrow…?’ We agree we’ll go tomorrow. Tomorrow and we three go for a drink in an unholy bar round the corner. I get there later after talking to the man in the cornershop and buying some milk & a four-pack of beer. ‘This place is full of cunts,’ I say. I had woken in the best mood, but then it took a turn and never really recovered. We sit at a table but then people come along and surround us, so we exclaim—’For fuck’s sake!’ and move to another, three times. At last we give up trying to avoid them. One has his chair against mine. The beer is all right; the last round is not what I asked for, but I don’t mention it so that I can write about it later. I text her—’I wish I were with you.’ One has just become a grandfather, the other just got the all-clear from cancer; all of us talk about pretty actors and what happened to them. Not enough people are doing dry january for my liking. ‘Want a fag?’ I ask him… no, because he doesn’t want to hold his grandson stinking of tobacco smoke. He keeps showing us photos of a fresh and pink sleeping baby. He has to get home to see the kid; just a quick drink, he says. The other guy can’t drink too much because he isn’t out of the woods yet, and there is a lot of medication and he forgets to take it at lunchtime. My night ends at half-seven and I walk home. What is this? How sneaky has this age crept upon me that I might find myself on a Friday night with nothing to show for several pints and a disgusting victim to other people’s responsibility? By the time my friend texts back I am already home.

My right ear is blocked. I fall asleep on my right side so that something may dislodge but during the night I creep to my left, and then the neighbourhood is muted. I don’t care; my bed is the best place in the world.