Wet Paint 02: Celluloid

"That last one sounds good, but where would they all wait their turn?"

The Sildenafil 100-milligram tablet I'd taken just before we began our earlier reconstruction of my and Louise's first railway journey began to respond to the idea, absurd though it was, of Jenna being multiply ravished in all her available orifices by an anonymous horde of rugby-supporting penises over a period of several days. She noticed.

"That would make me very sore" she said. "Now if you fucked me up the bum without lubricant that would hurt as well and be a lot easier to arrange."

By God, she was good.

I rolled her over so she was kneeling on top of the bed, pulling her buttocks wide apart to expose her tight little arse. It was still dry. Her cunt hadn't had a chance to start leaking over it while she was lying on her back plotting.

"Was I really that bad?" she said.

I was fully erect, as large and hard as I'd ever been as a young man. Thank Christ for modern medicine.

"Worse" I said. "You're an insufferable little whore and an embarrassment to me. When you're not trying to undermine me with how clever you are you're busy smearing your dirty wet cunt over uptight little Bulgarian dykes or thinking about servicing entire sports teams till you're plastered with their cum. You deserve this!"

I shoved my cock as far up her tight, resistant little hole as I could.

"Ahhh!"

I thrust into her again. She was breathing heavily.

"That fucking hurts!"

"It's supposed to."

Her cunt was wettening rapidly. I could feel it melting as my balls slapped against it every time I pushed into her. I could smell her thick, swampy dampness -- decaying vegetation and fresh coriander -- mingled with the sweaty, cloacal odour of her arse stirred up by each thrust.

"And keep your hands where they are! You're not getting finished off till I'm done fucking this filthy tight arse. You're being punished, remember, bitch?"

"Go on, then, hurt me! Rip my hole to pieces with that stiff cock. Make me bleed. Shoot your load right up me. Let it drip out of my ruined arse mixed with shit and sweat and blood!"

"Dirty little whore!" She was taking control. She knew exactly what she needed to say. Clever, clever girl.

I pulled her arsecheeks as wide apart as possible.

"I'm going to tear you in half, cunt!" I said, ramming up her so hard that I squashed my testicles painfully against her and, at the invocation of that final word, my favourite thing of hers, the dark heart of our relationship and origin of the world, I shot my load right into her gaping rectum.

As she was finally allowed to masturbate herself frantically to explosive orgasm, cum dripped out of her red-raw arsehole, lightly blended with shit and sweat, though thankfully no blood.

She sucked my cock clean, swallowing our shared effluvia with evident relish. I licked out her arse with similar enthusiasm, trying at the same time to soothe her inflamed little ring with my tongue.

I licked her cunt clean. We held each other.

There's a wonderful passage in the Canadian novelist Robertson Davies's 'The Rebel Angels', in which a character talks about his liking for anal sex with other men: 'I want no truck with Gay Liberation or hokum about alternative lifestyles; I want neither the love that dare not speak its name nor the love that blats its name to every grievance committee. "Gnosce teipsum" says the Oracle at Delphi; know thyself, and I do. I'm just a gross old bugger and I like it rough -- and I like the mess and I like the stink...'

Ever since I first read that book I've known that that was me and my tastes, too. I never wanted to prettify or make respectable what I and my willing partners chose to get up to in bedrooms, bathrooms, studies, living rooms, toilets on trains and other public places, or to sanitise or wish away the dark smells and filthy flavours, the dirt and the disreputability of it. Maybe the whole point of it was the knowledge that it disgusted others. Perhaps the essence of its pleasure was the reversal of shame into a secret celebration. I liked the mess and I liked the stink. And I liked Jenna.

"We'll have to change the sheets, I suppose" she said. "And at the risk of being a know-all bitch and incurring further punishment we're going to have to get a good digital copy of the original 'Everything He Wanted To Do.' Jean-Luc won't be able to show a grainy old VHS tape to Pedro Almodovar and the assembled eminent perverts of Europe."

"I could bugger you all over again" I said, aware that this would require at least another 50mg of Viagra. "You're right. I'll call Ted tomorrow and see what he suggests."

Because it was so rarely exhibited, Louise's original piece -- in the form of twelve boxes of slide transparencies, an ancient rotating slide projector, and a complicated timing mechanism attached to its power source -- was more or less permanently resident in the Arts Council of England's national sculpture store, an anonymous warehouse on a small trading estate incongruously situated in the middle of the West Yorkshire countryside. I'd been there a few times to view obscure items from the collection, and was struck by how closely its interior resembled the final scene of 'Raiders of the Lost Ark', a limitless space crammed with high stacks of crates laid out in seemingly infinite rows.

I'd also become friends with Ted Richie, the chief technician. He was responsible for the work's conservation, for taking it out to exhibit wherever it was being shown, and for putting it back in what he tried to ensure was the same condition in which it had left his care. Technicians are the lifeblood of the art world. Artists frequently don't care about the finish or durability of what they make; curators want to achieve impossible effects in their gallery spaces and damn the effect of light, draughts, heat, cold, vibrations, dust or moisture; punters all too often think there is nothing wrong with poking a piece to see what it feels like, or allowing their children to assume it's fair game for climbing or wiping snot and spit on. Without techies, the entire patrimony of Western culture would quite literally fall apart.

If anyone could tell me what needed to be done to produce a viable copy of 'Everything He Wanted' it was Ted.

"I'll check the catalogue, dig it out, have a look, and call you back" he said.

Knowing the Herculean task involved in finding a forty year-old piece in that vast assemblage of crates and containers I expected that to take several days, so went back to the similarly convoluted process of trying to persuade the Arnold Markstein Family Foundation to send me copies of the great man's notebooks. Following my apparent triumph in persuading them to let me have access to them, it soon transpired that they expected me to pay to go and live in New York for several weeks, reading the originals during office hours in a temperature controlled cell while wearing latex gloves and a face mask.

To my immense surprise, Ted phoned back the same day.

"The good news is it can be done with a suitably high resolution scanner and a reasonable quality laptop. The bad is that if we go through the official channels, you'll have to get permissions from twelve-year-old administrators who've never heard of Louise Stearman, provide documentary evidence that you own the rights -- probably in triplicate -- and I'll have to get the Council's own equipment shipped up here from London. It'll take weeks and cost thousands."

"How many thousands?"

"Many."

"And if we don't go through official channels?"

"I've got a mate at Leeds Uni who'll lend me the scanner, you bring the laptop, and you bung me, say, a couple of hundred quid for my trouble. We'll do it ourselves after closing time. Shouldn't take more than four or five hours."

He gave me a very specific date when his boss would be away at some official junket. Jenna booked the rail tickets.

I should probably point out that this all took place in early April of the year 2020. You will now know what's coming next.

First it was Jean-Luc.

"Almodovar's baled, the bastard. Said he's worried about this Chinese coronavirus thing and doesn't want to be stuck in a foreign country if travel restrictions are imposed. Putain de merde!"

As I've written elsewhere, this last imprecation is scatological and all but untranslatable into English, so I haven't tried.

Then the Chair of the Foundation.

"Mrs Delvoe-Washington is in hospital with some kind of respiratory illness. President Trump may not believe in the coronavirus, but the Board has decided to close its offices for the duration as a precaution. We feel sure you'll understand."

Mrs Delvoe-Washington was Arnold Markstein's elderly granddaughter, and the real power behind the Foundation. Unless she agreed, there was zero chance that I'd be granted copies of her ancestor's sacred, secret notebooks.

Then Jean-Luc again.

"It's cancelled. Fucked. Shit! No one will travel from anywhere else in the world, and I wouldn't want to stage a festival just for the yokels of Abbeville, even if they were remotely interested in anything cultural. Putain du Bon Dieu!"

Also untranslatable, though blasphemous rather than scatological.

Finally, just as I was about to phone Ted at the Arts Council store to find out how the land lay with him, the UK Prime Minister went on TV to instruct us all to stay at home until we were told otherwise.

We were locked down.

Jenna was watching Prime Minister Johnson's broadcast with me. We looked at each other.

"What's it going to be, then?" I said. "Are you going to stay here, or at your own place, or at Roza's?" For the first time I was experiencing the possibility that I might be jealous of Roza.

"Oh, here, if I can" she said, without hesitation. "You've got a much nicer place than my bedsit. I know you'll give me my space, and we can still work online. And we can fuck."

Without having realised how relieved I'd feel, I felt relieved.

"What about Roza?" I said.

"I'll talk to her."

The following morning, while the Prime Ministerial grace period for sorting out living arrangements under lockdown still pertained, she sat astride my face and urinated copiously into my mouth while fingering herself vigorously to orgasm. Then she left, promising to be back "in a couple of hours."

By the time of the Prime Minister's second evening news conference she still hadn't returned. I'd been unable to settle to any work all day, and when I finally succumbed to the urge to call her mobile in the middle of the afternoon she didn't answer.

A bottle and a half of Coonawarra Cabernet Sauvignon in, I began to realise that I would miss her horribly. Also, that if she had chosen Roza over me I was jealous in a way I'd never before been in my life. I'm an old man. I was happy to share her with another young girl whose tastes, smells and preferences couldn't at all be like my own, but I didn't want to relinquish her.

"Shut the fuck up, you old fool" I told my own mind. "You know the score. All this has been gravy. Girls like Jenna don't fall in love with geriatrics like you. Just count yourself lucky she's wanted to shag you, suck you, piss on you and receive the same treatment back for the time she has. Get real. You haven't been a teenager for fifty years."

The front door opened.

"Hi!" Jenna called.

I stood and met her at the entrance to the living room. I wanted to throw my arms around her, kiss her till she couldn't breathe, then fuck her as furiously as I was still capable of doing.

"Where have you been?" I said, rather pathetically.

She came to me and put her hands on my shoulders.

"I had to see Roza, remember?"

She kissed me gently.

Suddenly, I couldn't speak.

"I told you I wanted to stay with you" she said, possibly reading my fears. "I had to go to tell Roza and explain myself. She was cool. She's even sent you a little present."

I watched her smile, in that wolfish, mischievous way she had.

"What, a pair of her dirty pants?" I said.

"Better than that. The contents" said Roza from the doorway.