Pisstory Pt. 07: Performance

She led me back into the studio. The photographic lights she'd set up for the cameras had warmed the space up around the old couch. The arousingly rank scent of evaporating piss rose around me.

Louise fiddled with a box of electronics attached by a forest of wires to the camera stands, then knelt on the couch with her back to me, arse in the air.

"Start fucking me doggy-fashion. We've got about fifteen seconds before the first frames are triggered."

It was a profound relief to slide into her wet and pissy cunt. I clasped her buttocks in my fingers and shoved in as far as possible. There was no responding movement from her. I was going to have to do all the work. I pulled out and shoved back in again.

There was a whirr and a clatter as the first of the randomly timed motordrives kicked in.

I thrusted harder, realising as I did so how much I'd always assumed equal participation by the woman I was fucking. As she'd said she would, Louise was remaining completely passive. I breathed deeply to stimulate myself with the scent of her cunt. I remembered she'd liked me pushing two fingers up her arse, so did that as I continued fucking her. Still no response. This must be what it's like to rape a girl, I thought.

And suddenly I was very, very hard and fully engaged in taking Louise's cunt like it was my possession.

I pushed, shoved, got a third finger inside her anal sphincter, separated them to widen her hole, slipped my cock out of her cunt and shoved it into her rectum as hard and far as it would go. With a mixture of horror and vertiginous delight I realised I wanted to cause her pain, and the very thought pushed me still further and harder.

The motordrives whirred, clicked, harmonised, clashed, fought each other, stuttered, stopped, started again.

There was no sound recording being taken, and Louise hadn't said I shouldn't speak. I pulled my sweaty, stained cock out of her arsehole.

"Turn over, bitch" I said.

I half expected her to come back with a typically sarcastic rejoinder, perhaps even slap me or scratch my face. I recall thinking the possibility of that was in itself a turn-on. But she just did what she was told, raising her head when I ordered her, taking the entire length of my dirty cock into her mouth and throat. She didn't even use her teeth. In her eyes was an expression that flickered between a willed blankness and triumph.

I tried to choke her with my prick, which I'd have sworn was twice its usual length. Again, no response. The camera drives sang.

I've no idea how long I normally took to cum when fucking a woman. Sometimes it had seemed to be forever, like that second night with Alana when four years of shameful indifference had blossomed briefly into what is still my only brief, doomed experience of love. With Therese in the Etoile du Nord cold store we'd managed to get some messy mutual oral sex concluded satisfactorily in the time it had taken for Jean-Luc and Natacha, themselves fresh from fucking in the staff lavatory, to locate us at the restaurant's closing time. Now, though, twenty minutes seemed to last forever, and the only way I was able to stop myself cumming every time I started screwing a different hole in Louise's inert body was by switching almost immediately to another. All the time there was the bizarre to-and-fro of her absence of reaction numbing my own, and the sharp erotic charge of feeling like I was taking her against her will.

The alarm went off, and suddenly I had sixty seconds to coax my numb cock into ejaculating over her. I was fucking her missionary style with her ankles resting on my shoulders. I instantly pulled out, and without even thinking about it, dragged her unceremoniously off the couch and onto the floor.

I stood over her, wanking hard, my cock above her face, not even looking at her but trying to summon some image which, in the remaining diminished time would push me over the edge. I spooled back over the time I'd been fucking her, back into our return to the studio after she'd pissed in my mouth, back to her spreading her legs, opening her cunt wide, and showing me her urethra.

"There's one hole I haven't fucked that I really want to!" I said, and I shot what can only be described as a thick rope of cum into the air and over her face.

We picked our way through melting slush back to Ozzy's barber shop, Louise carrying the towels he'd insisted on.

"Darling, you were marvellous" she said to me with an exaggerated directorial air. "Of course, we won't know for certain till all the film's developed, but you certainly held up your end. That was exactly what I wanted."

Ozzy was shaving a terrified looking businessman whose brown suit jacket hung boringly on a stand very like the one Louise used for soiled knickers, retro pinstripes and Otto Dix reconstructions. Another customer, wearing sunglasses indoors, a Teddy Boy drape coat and crepe-soled brothel creepers, had his nose in 'The Face' magazine and affected not to notice there was anyone else in the room.

"Own towels. Good" Ozzy flicked soap expertly off his razor into the sink. "You know where you're going."

"Look at this" Louise said as she led me up the creaking stairs. At the top, the cracked and worn linoleum stopped. The landing was carpeted in what looked like zebra skin. The walls were golden.

"Fucking hell!"

"And here's Ozzy's bedroom."

Through a door finished in what was obviously intended to be a white marble effect I beheld an enormous four-poster bed, as gold as the landing walls, covered in black satin and leopardskins. The carpet was white shagpile, the entire room surrounded by mirrors.

"This is why my credit's good with Ozzy. I designed all this for him."

"It's fucking hideous!"

"Isn't it? But camp as tits at the same time. It's what Ozzy wanted, so it's what Ozzy got. He's royalty. He's got plenty of folding."

Everything in the bathroom, except the gold taps, was the exact shade of pink of the inside of Louise's vagina, which she happily displayed for me again and pissed all over my face and into my mouth. This time she let me cum, helping me with her mouth, bringing herself off with an enormous glass dildo that occupied pride of place on the shelf above the wash basin.

"Keep the noise down, you shameless tarts!" Ozzy shouted up the stairs. "And you, Madam, make sure you wash and dry my crystal cock after it's been up your disreputable fanny!"

"Well, darling, I've got to get down to the dark room and I suppose you're obliged to reinsert yourself into the bosom of your family" Louise said as we walked back through the Market to her studio. I said I supposed I was.

"Come back next Saturday. You can see today's slides and I'll take you to the Blitz Club. You'll like it there."

"Hey, Joe X!"

Vaughn (or was it Molly?) was waving from the stall.

"Can you sing?" Molly (or was it Vaughn?) asked as I approached.

"Dunno. I never really tried."

"Fancy an audition? For our band?"

Louise nudged me sharply in the ribs with her elbow.

"The answer's yes, darling."

And so it transpired that the following weekend I would be back here again, slides and the Blitz with Louise on Saturday, a try-out as the singer with Dead Babies on Sunday.

When I walked into the living room of my family's little suburban house that afternoon my mother didn't recognise me. Then she did, and burst into tears.

"You haven't written for weeks! And what's that you're wearing?"

Something had, irrevocably, changed.

Mum had left my mail on my bed. There wasn't any such thing as junk mail in those days, and since I had no memberships and no subscriptions, had enrolled on no mailing lists, had never bought anything on credit and didn't even have a bank account, this amounted to four letters and one picture postcard.

The postcard was from Charlie O'Keefe, who'd decided, inspired he said by my travelling example, to go visit relatives in Australia. It showed a ramshackle outside toilet in the middle of a desert with the caption 'G'day from Darwin.' One of the letters contained a cheque for overpaid tax from my factory job before I went to France. Two were identical missives from London University asking me to confirm that I would be taking up my place there in September. The last was postmarked Nantes, from Yann Morvan.

I delayed opening it till I'd read and reread everything else, including Charlie's laboured puns, the tax office's dry and incomprehensible prose, the University's bureaucratic condescension.

Another envelope fell out when I opened Yann's. Scrawled on it: 'Yann -- please make sure Joseph gets this. Don't read it. Don't show it to anyone else. Forgive me. Alana.'

'My dear Jo' Yann's own letter began. 'I'm so very sorry about what happened. Perhaps I should have told you, but my beloved little sister had had problems with her mental health for several years. That was the reason she was obliged to resit her Bac. That's why my parents were so protective of her. She'd been so sad for such a long time, that when you came to visit and she suddenly became happy I thought it was a miracle, and did everything I could to encourage her, and you. Even though there's been this dreadful outcome, I still think my father and mother should have given the pair of you time, and I will forever feel guilty that I didn't stand up to them. Alana posted the enclosed envelope to me the morning she died, care of the hotel where I was working, and I have respected her wishes in not opening it and in making sure it gets to you. I hope whatever is in it will give you solace. By some strange working of fate I was called up last week for my Military Service, so will be away from the family home for two years. I'm glad of that, even though my parents have already lost one child. Perhaps we'll be reconciled one day. And perhaps you and I will meet again in happier circumstances. Your friend. Yann.'

I was crying before I got to the end of Yann's letter. My mother knocked on my bedroom door to ask if I wanted a cup of tea.

"No!" I said. Then "Sorry, no. I've had some bad news. From Yann in France. Have we got any beer?"

She went away and brought me up a can of Dad's lager. I knocked back half of it, then I opened Alana's envelope.

There wasn't much in it. Just a quatrain from a poem I knew to be by Baudelaire, 'Don Juan in Hell':

'A great stone man, stiff in his uniform

Was the stern helmsman on that gloomy run,

But our calm hero, bent upon his sword,

Stared at the wake, and gave his glance to none.'

And under it, in her childish school cursive: 'I love you. Alana.'

I finished the beer, found another in the fridge, and while drinking it phoned the Registry number on the University's letter. I confirmed that I would be attending in September, but requested to change my course from English Literature to History of Art.

Then I went to bed and slept for three days straight.