By Tiernan Blanchard
It was important to know the rules. When you touch (drinking, sports), when you don’t (anytime else.) When you laugh, when you swear. Mirror, mirror, wait it through, show what is expected. Learn it fast- faster - because they’ve got a brute instinct for seeing where you get it wrong. You only needed a correction once - twice - two and a half times, and now it is a different, greyer, city and a different smell in the air and you know how to do it now.
Drink in hand, raise to lips, empty glass.
In the first city, the yellow and brown one, the lesson you learned was from a man named Kyle. In this city with the flat sky and the sick river, it’s Jason.
Jason is tall, wiry, and unhandsome. He has blotched reddish cheeks and the kind of fine blond hair that thins early. His eyes are hard and angry. His shoulders are always tight, his knuckles always pushing up white and furious through the fine scarred skin over them.
Jason talks about his wife, about the girl he’s cheating on his wife with. He talks about their bodies, how soft and flabby his wife has gotten after two children, how her pussy is little more than sagging roast beef. You know by now that only some things are allowed to be soft. The girlfriend is hotter, and she appreciates and understands him more. Her tits are where they should be. Once you said ‘on her chest then,’ and everyone acted as if you had said something very funny and clever.
He says these things and drinks and you laugh when the other men laugh, which is at the points that are cruelest. It is a very particular kind of laugh, low and loud, like acting. You understand acting. You’ve been doing it a very long time.
Jason thinks his boss at the call centre is not a real woman, and is actually a man. She’s rough and ballbusting and ugly. You’ve not met her, but you think maybe she’d have to be rough, to handle Jason. Jason thinks girls who go out in short skirts can’t complain when men grope them. You think the other men don’t like Jason so much as they are afraid of him. You’ve seen him start a fight before. You saw him win it, slamming the head of a teenager into wet concrete at 1 in the morning, street lights shining off the blood from the boy’s nose and mouth.
You are very careful to not be the kind of thing Jason hates. You learned, those two and a half times, just how much it hurts to be hated by a Jason. Jasons are prone to biting when they land on top of you. They are prone to getting hard against your hip when they punch you in the face, and then punching you harder for being a faggot. You have learned better now. You have learned to not get hit.
If Jason knew how soft your insides are, how wet and pulpish, how filthy and flexing and pulsing, how you are nothing but tender aching, he would hit you until you died.
Perhaps you would like that. It would feel better than what you do from the central shelter of the circle, from within the fortress of men, the thing they do not see or do not understand when they see it. In nightclubs, sweaty and stinking of spilled booze, they see you go up to women, who they hate, and talk to them, and they see you leave with them, and they do not see anything else. In this you are a lad. You are a ladies man. You are a right shagger. You don’t tell them any different. And don’t they see the women afterwards, sometimes, in their bright short dresses and cheap sweet perfumes? A slow kind of infestation that even the women barely notice and that men certainly don’t. Women’s problems. It’s not like pregnancy, or an STD, though you never use condoms. No harm done. Because they are there, with avid eyes, and their own conquests. Though your friends don’t really have much of an eye for women, do they? Only an eye for what is beneath their clothes, for the things they can use women for. The best kind of woman is just the best kind of woman is waist high with a flat head, Jason says, and you laugh.
But it’s not good enough. It’s not right. Jason would be better, you think. It would feel better. But you are here, in this dull grey town, under this huge damp grey sky, and men look at women and avoid looking at men. And the men aren’t looking at the women, but at their tits and arses. And the hollow wet ache inside you doesn’t ease when you go with the women. What you want is not fulfilled. Their rented bedrooms, high heels abandoned on the floor. Pictures on the walls to cover up landlord Magnolia paint, Audrey Hepburn or Paris or sometimes pictures of flowers, animals, family. Flatmates with earplugs in, pretending not to be here. Never go to his place, he can lock the door on you. Their faces when you do it. The bruise spreads, the wound opens, hot claws fasten in the prolapse and the women go with new clear sight and under everything is a filth that cannot be washed out, and its name is Jason.
Jason has two daughters. What is he growing in them? What has he planted in the rich soil of their souls? Nothing good. In their shared bedroom, what do they speak of when they speak of fathers?
He wants a son. He tells you so one night, drunker than normal. He wants a son, talks about teaching him to be a man. Football, beer, girls. What to do with girls, which has nothing at all to do with love. There is too much girlishness in his house, too much in his life, too much in the nation. Strong men are needed, who do not cry and whinge. He says this to you outside, in the smoking area, where you pretend to smoke, and he devolves into one of his rambles about queers, about women, about how women make boys into queers by being too soft, about how his father kicked the shit out of him and it never did him any harm.
You wonder if he hits his daughters, his wife.
Probably.
You wonder if he notices how he looks at your mouth.
Above you both is an overcast sky. You cannot see the stars. You cannot see the moon. When you were new, these things were a wonder, but you have learned that men-shapes aren’t allowed to feel wonder, or thrill to beauty, or weep unless they are drunk and their wife has left them.
Jason wants a son, but not one of these little poofy ones. He wants himself, repeated in miniature, another slice of misery directed outwards. Someone, everyone, made Jason into a clenched fist.
He works hard, he tells you, he provides, and his wife bitches and moans and doesn’t even get rid of the flab. She signed up for weightwatchers at the community centre, but does it do fuck? Does it? Twenty quid a month and she’s still wearing her maternity sweatpants. He hopes his daughters learn how to treat men better, women these days are cruel and selfish. Too much attitude. He thinks his girlfriend might be cheating on him and if she is he’ll kill her. At least his wife knows better. He never uses their names. You have never met any of them. He wouldn’t trust a ladies man like you around his girls, haha. His girls, you think, are not even teenagers yet. He’s teaching them not to be filthy sluts, he says, not like most girls. Filthy nasty bitchy awful sluts, cunts the lot of them. Lying, stupid, worthless.
He is very very drunk, and he keeps looking at your mouth.
He just keeps looking at your mouth.
If only he knew what noises it makes in the dark, what worlds it opens onto, all the dark wet red places, all the swallowing convulsing places.
The smoking area has fairy lights up on the walls, an attempt at prettification that makes it more squalid. The lights are a cold white, scattered across concrete and dying plants. Jason’s eyelashes are long, in the dark. His face is close to yours. You wonder about him as a baby, and it makes you so sick and sad and hungry.
It is the closeness that makes you incautious. You are not the kind of thing that can overpower, demand, control. You are a quieter and more vulnerable thing entirely, in your cage of ribs and spine, inside this body that is meat that is blood, that is rot staved off by inches.
You agree with him that you’d like a son. It’s not something you can have, though. Not… permitted, though permission may be the wrong word. The blockage does not translate. Growth is carefully controlled and planned, your children nothing more than polyps and fibroids at this stage in the process. Small proto-cancers. Want matters more than what is allowed, even though perhaps it should not. Though your want is not for Jason, the ravenous hunger that is not entirely unlike love is not for Jason. Probably nobody loves Jason, not his wife nor his mistress nor his two daughters. Probably they are afraid and want him not to hurt them, and they think that is the same thing. You are also afraid, and you want him not to hurt you. It is not love.
But there is something within you could love. There is rich fertile flesh within him that could be the right kind of garden for a forbidden thing .
He looks at your mouth again, and you take the risk, press yours against his. He breathes in, sharp and horrified and aroused, but before he can say or do anything you slip your tongue in. And in. And in and in and in and in, all the way down before he can bite down, curling unfurling down the flexing tunnel of throat and you unbutton your shirt and then your ribcage, to show the realness, the fleshness of you. That beatable crushable thing that can shimmer, shift and sidle in down the knot scar of bellybutton and settle, create, divide from you in sharp tight pinching.
And when you are done, and you slide out of him, he stands bright eyed and still. You hear the first trembling thrums in his hollow cavities of body.
Forbidden. Unallowed. You can feel the trouble coming. Perhaps, perhaps, it will be worth it.
Within him, a new kind of decay divides.
Tiernan Blanchard is a writer and occasional poet from England, who formerly wrote as C.B. Blanchard. He has a wide range of interests, opinions and obsessions which he cannot shut up about as @GayCannibalism on Bluesky. His website is CBridhBlanchard.weebly.com.