Day one.

Wake from a sex dream. In a computer game with Ari, we must pass through a demonic realm; descending the spiral stairs, we encounter a horned beast who hisses the things we most fear. In seconds, we are separated – I know I’m lost – we don’t share the same fears. The demon climbs the stairs on all fours, grabbing at my legs, licking with a blunt red tongue at my thighs, and finally rimming me and giving me head. I’m close to coming, holding on to the stone steps that are grinding into my hips and back, when Ari returns, and with him my sense. I scramble out of that filthy stairwell and hold on to him, trying to explain what was happening; we leave the darkness. We’re on the wide main street of a lovely grey blue city, we’re holding close, I’m delighted at his physical reality - his long arms, his neck, the feeling of his stubble, and his smell. He’s always so present in dreams. He turns to the laptop, and I watch him as he works to find whatever function it was that left me alone on the stairs. His face is serious as he presses the delete button. I’m crying – he’s losing something I know he needs. But the grief turns to pleasure as I realise I’m being reprogrammed too; I’m becoming encoded in him. I wake, again close to coming, lines of code running down the screen, tears running down my face.

Twice denied an orgasm, and feeling guilty and freaked out, I start fucking myself with my face in the pillows. I’m fantasising the demon with its tongue in my ass, but it gets too scary as I gradually wake up. So when I finally come, I’m the guy that tried to fuck me back in Spain, when I was a slutty, virginal 14. Buried balls-deep in my own bloodied cunt, shoes slipping on the knickers I yanked off myself, I’m soaking wet. The orgasm’s broad and warm, but not as abandoned as usual: I’m still too focused on the demon’s bright stub of a tongue. I try not to open my mouth when I come. My teeth chatter with the pressure. I’m briefly a monkey, then relax into blood. I’ve bitten my tongue.

Straight into the shower for some reassurance. I’m kind of spooked still, so I stand dreaming in the steam for a long time before I start fucking myself with the water from the showerhead. This time it’s hard to settle on anything satisfying. Scenarios, images, flicker and drop. I feel too much like only myself, too much like a girl, and not in a hot way. I’m not a conduit. I can’t feel anyone else. I finally abandon all hope of coming, and sit on the floor of the shower, dreaming with my face in the water, spitting bloody mouthfuls down the drain.

An open letter to Julie Burchill....

in response to this article:

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/localgovernment/story/0,,2034685,00.html

Dear Julie,

Your usual heady brew of misinformation and hyperbole is fine for your day job, cultural criticism being, after all, the backbone of any class war. My day job, however, involves spending public money providing housing for people in often severe housing need, and if you're going to talk about how I do it, I suggest you do your research.

You and I met at a party about 18 months ago, and quickly got into a scrap over the Decent Homes standard. Through great mouthfuls of cheesecake which you distributed generously over your listeners, you berated me in your trademark squeak about the privatisation of Council housing, gentrification, and the uselessness of attempts at social inclusion. My attempts to argue that good insulation, heating, and one's own bathroom should not be beyond the reach of people in social housing met with more desserty tirades about digital TV and landscaped gardens. Reading those same lines now would amuse me if they didn't reveal that you have read nothing, learned nothing, and listened to no one from that day to this. I guess I should just smile and ask for a cut of your book profits, but your allegations about the cost of the Decent Homes agenda are nothing short of fantastical, and I've had enough of reading you whining about my work in the newspaper I've read since I was a child.

It's been years, Julie, of paranoia and rampant hypocrisy and accusations of public malfeasance. I have a suggestion as to how you can return 'your town' to its glory days: take the profits from the sale of your house, a home which you sold to developers who built luxury flats there, on a site where we fought to provide affordable housing instead. Take all that dirty, dirty cash, hire a lawyer, and seek a judicial review of our services. I double fucking dare you.

Love, from the vipers' nest,

Petra

In my room

Almost all the way along one wall of my room is a mirrored wardrobe that faces my bed and, next to that, the sash window. Dawn has distinct stages, the mirror shows me: dark blue, heavy damask hangs behind the window, then silver and violet gauze, swirling in dew. Finally, delicate, rosy morning light invades the room and suffuses the mirror, and its reflection beams me upright.

The mirror is flattering. With the light behind me, I'm more immediate; with feet of mirror either side and above, I have my proper proportion. The mirror seems to like me. I enjoy dressing in it, fortunately, since I'd have to dress inside the wardrobe if I wanted to avoid it - everywhere else in the room is benignly surveilled. Dressing in the morning, I watch myself straight on. I panic less, am less surprised by the way my body changes the look of clothes. The mirror enjoys the same colours I do; in my eggshell room, orange and white, silver-grey and green are shown in their exact loveliness, on and around me.

But I think it's making me more lonely, all this looking at myself. When I wake up, sit up in my pile of white eiderdown, and reach over for the water, the sight of my long, pale back makes me wish someone else were watching. Now, as I type, I'm aware of the ladybird flash of painted nails in the opposite corner of the room. Singing, once a constant solitary activity, has become a performance, and I know exactly how far I can open my mouth without fillings becoming visible. I've started laughing that way, too, and every time I do, I’m pleased by how careful I‘m remembering to be.

Friends seem bothered by the mirror, and most lovers intimidated by it. Those that aren’t behave like circus ringmasters, their gestures exaggerated. I find them ridiculous. (The mirror becomes a camera for me to mug my dissatisfaction to: all this can be edited later, it promises.) None of the lovers I’ve fooled around with in this room has dared, yet, to ask, much less demand, that I use the mirror as a prop, or even that I watch us fucking, and I refrain thankfully from watching the aftermath of sex, the precise amount of fondling and smiling I can enjoy before I announce I’m hungry and we should get up and grab a bite. I leave them to whatever they see of themselves, and dress out of sight, in the bathroom, while the kettle boils.

How I joined the mile-high club

‘So we’re just going to email, for a while, right? Until we know what's up. No phone calls, no texts.’

He sees my face change.

‘I’m just checking we both remember it the same way before you go.’

****

Seat 27A is narrower than I think I can stand. I surprise myself when the steward comes around with supper by announcing that I’m 4 months pregnant and need two meals. I am neither pregnant nor hungry, actually. I’ve barely been eating or sleeping in the states - Ari and I both had stomachs rigid and ragged with the stress of trying not to notice a thing. I want to feel full now; I want the fastest, deepest sleep I can get. The man in the next seat smiles as I reach over him to accept my second tray. I offer him my brownies, my chocolate mousse. I’m only interested in meat and starch. I fill and empty my mouth.

It works, kind of, all that salt, all those carbs. I flutter into a doze, but I’m repeatedly pulling up short of sleep, avoiding with a jolt that vulnerable state where you can’t not think about what hurts. I really do not want to dream. No reading, then, since it puts me out for the count. No music - nothing associative. I need other people’s stories, stories with endings. As many films as I can cram into 10 hours of suspension over earth. Thank Christ his parents paid for me to fly Virgin. Their in-flight is great. I navigate alphabetically through most of last year’s idiot box-office smashes before settling on Harry Potter and the goblet of fire.

The steward checks on me. Am I comfortable? If I need anything, I have only to ask. And since I am pregnant, if I wish to use the first class bathroom, that will be perfectly acceptable. I thank him without a scantling of remorse and return to the headphones and seatback screen. My neighbour lowers his seat and falls asleep; the trays are collected, the lights on the plane dim, and I settle in miserably, eyes front, with as much attention as I can muster. I’m so exhausted that I don’t know whether it’s hindering or helping. The emotions the film provokes are delicate and unlikely - I’m chilled by the reincarnation of a malign sorcerer, I’m moved by the loyalty and courage of magical children. I mourn the death of a winged horse. Trying not to cry is pointless. Nothing and anything are the same hideous thing. I give up looking for a feel-good movie and cue up Transamerica.

I’ve been crying resignedly for over an hour, carefully focused on the screen, when my neighbour touches my arm. I’m surprised, look for the steward, expecting to have to perform some task, return a bottle or a tray, but my neighbour only takes my hand. He’s bigger than I am and taller, and has a gentle, broad face. I withdraw my hand and wipe my eyes and nose. His skin is greenish by the screen glow. I don’t know what to do. It seems rude to just return to the film; I press pause on the handset and look at him again. His face is full of concern. He lifts the armrest between us, gradually, and puts an arm around my shoulders, pulling me into his chest. It’s comforting and derealising at the same time, and something relaxes. It’s helping to feel grateful to a stranger. He pulls his blanket over me carefully, and my arms settle into position, one around his waist - his body is wide around, and soft - and the other curled under my chin. It’s not until I’m nearly asleep, and the waist arm gradually drops to his lap, that I realise he’s hard.

Well fucking well. You neighbourly horndog in the sky, you. To get so hard at the thought of comforting a crying pregnant lady hardly speaks of a healthy libido. What a gross bourgeois fixer! But I soon realise that in this situation, for some reason, spite + selfpity = arousal; I’m grinning inside myself. I’m about to go home to absolute uncertainty, and the knowing sympathy of every single one of my friends. Why wouldn’t I touch this guy’s dick? I imagine him screaming girlishly in protest for a second, swallow a giggle, and get straight to work on his zip. He puts his mouth on my hair, and we begin to wrestle slowly around together under the blanket for access to breasts and genitals. In the plane’s false atmosphere, we are the exact same temperature. It’s like being in the womb with a twin you can eat. I use both hands on his cock until they‘re wet, then alternate between his cock and his balls, thumbing them gently with my palm underneath. He lifts himself off the seat, huffing gently like a horse on the top of my head, and sticks his thumb through the gauze of my bra as he comes. His face is so silly and sweaty, his hair sticking straight up from all the static we made under the nylon blanket, that it’s impossible to despise him properly. He looks like an exclamation mark. But it’s also impossible to let an exclamation mark make you come, even when it has two uncomfortable fingers inside you and a hot fat thumb on your clitoris. I grab his wrist and pull his hand out of my knickers, and he tries to kiss me in the confusion. I don’t think so, mister. I wriggle back to my seat, and one of my headphones falls out of my ear. He gets busy, blushing, cleaning himself up. I stare and stare at him until he can’t look at me, and then I fall asleep.

Petra likes Death!

A quick look at my vertical stack of DVD’s, I used to think, didn’t reveal much. Not only because I’m pretty resolute about refusing to believe that taste reveals much about people, but also because I really spend very little time watching films outside of the cinema, so I tend not to buy DVD’s for myself. The DVD’s I own are, by and large, gifts, and they’re usually from people who don’t know me well enough to know how little time I will spend watching them.

There are exceptions, stuff I grabbed off the shelf with genuine love and hunger and can’t live without. The Twin Peaks box set, Fire Walk with Me. Kramer vs. Kramer. Happiness I stole from the library; I literally couldn’t give it back. The Bjork documentary, the Lightning Bolt road film. Certainly not enough to construct an aesthetic, you wouldn’t think.
But the people who don’t really know me, it seems, have other ideas. Petra likes Death! they unanimously chorus. Donnie Darko, the Ice Storm, Magnolia, Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark, both Abre los Ojos and Vanilla Sky, Kids, Blue Velvet, the Straight Story - my DVD collection is the equivalent of a lesbian mix tape: a total thematic flatline. Every dark cinepop moment of the last 10 years or so has reminded someone of me. And it turns out they’re probably right.

I’ve noticed, only recently, that my interest in pop culture is a shade macabre. The art I like that’s glossy and cheerful always undermines itself, always eventually corrodes. Somewhere in me I knew it was ok to love Britney the mouseketeer. I felt the abject gutter slut lurking, dreamed of teasing her out. Beyonce will come to me, too, one day, just you wait. She’ll join me, Britney (whom I’m renaming Fusty Princess Fallopia) and Charlotte Church in a gigantic, underfilled waterbed, where I’ll throw them all around by their weaves and fist them with fried chicken.

My favourite songwriters, with the exception of Bjork, are all addicted, suicidal, mentally ill, or otherwise utterly miserable: Courtney Love, Kristin Hersh, Morrissey, Elliott Smith, Lou Barlow, Kathleen Hanna. (I like lots of bands that sound miserable too, but I think it’s a bit of a stretch to think of an entire band as all sharing the same affective disorder.) Singer-songwriters are so genteel in their self destruction. Even Elliott Smith, who stabbed himself in the heart, makes despair sound effete. Perhaps I should stop being such a tasteful bourgeois coward and go goth. But I hate goths; I have all kinds of violent fantasies about them - about sawing off their awful long hair with knives, pushing them under buses, and otherwise punishing them for their weedy insistence on death as a familiar. I always thought I was offended by that idea, but maybe I’m jealous - too insistent on my superior understanding of morbidity: I’ll show you death!

It’s a running joke among my friends that my superpower is making people cry. I just look at them and they’re off. Even relative strangers get right to exhuming when left alone with me for 5 minutes. What’s wrong? I ask, and they tell me they don’t know why they‘re so upset, then out it comes, whatever it is. And my close friends - there isn’t one who hasn’t told me their most terrible secret. Come on, you know it’s true. I’m not a party friend. I’m the one with the flaming sword; the one you trust to go first into the dark. Right? Right?

Since you’re all, by default, asking the rude question, the answer’s this: yeah, you’re right, death is my subject. It’s my subject cos it’s my enemy, assholes. I have no intention of dying, and I know you can all smell it on me. I’m sorry it makes you all cry. I don’t know why it would. Is there something I should know?

my hips lie

without wishing to dry my knickers on your collective radiator, gentle readers, i'm afraid it's confession time again.

yeah, so i'm a prick tease. (no, there's no such thing as a clit tease. is there a fist tease? no. i'm talking about the philosophic vulnerability of erection. blood on the bone. it's specific, ok? bi five you later).

one thing i wish more men got: wanting to make out is not the same as wanting to fuck. and you bet if i think it'll make the make out funner, i'll moan in your mouth and roll all over you on the couch. go ahead and talk me into letting you stay. i'll talk you to sleep and then happily wriggle my bum against your morning wood (oh spoonicorn, how heartbreakingly unmythical your requirements are), scamper to the bathroom and get off in the shower. sorry and all. i'd try to muster some shame for all of you concerned that i make mankind just a touch more likely to rape cats on the way home, but those sluts can take care of themselves. cat penises have little barbs in them, you know. it's a hard knock life.

besides, i've recently seen the other side of my brazenly uncompromising coin, and it's as immodest as it is corrupt. 'my hips don't lie' is the most recent output from shakira, featuring wyclef, or wyclef, featuring shakira, i can't figure which. this is a marriage of equals. not one time is wyclef's trademark incomprehensible gurgle outstripped by shakira's mournful larry the lamb (complete with overdone shanks). the video, during which our heroes wander about in what are clearly two entirely different depressingly badly-dressed warehouses, looking for one another and instead finding 1) a child in a mask and 2) some pink sheets, is also less than illuminating, but it's the song's thesis that truly grates.

'ooh baby, when you talk like that', bleats shakira, waving her arms about and humping a chair, 'you make a woman go mad. so be wise, and keep on reading the signs of my body.' 'don't fight it, don't fight it', an enthusiastic clef advises his lady love, before mugging to camera a brief linguaphone course for date rapists: 'i never really knew that she could move like this. it makes a man want to speak spanish. como se llama, bonita? mi casa, su casa, shakira, shakira'. truly, the paraclausithuron is alive and well. shit, that door is wedged wide open anyway, and that's how shakira seems to like it, if, as she states, her increasingly frenzied hips are anything to go by. stoically ignoring attempts at interruption by a child in a mask, she tells her suitor she's aware of the movement of his body, 'half animal, half man,' (possibly my least favourite moment in pop culture since Mother Knowles designed those artfully ripped jungle bikinis for destiny's child). 'i don't really know what i'm doing, but you seem to have a plan', she continues cheerfully. at this point i'm thinking that poor kid in the mask may be played by the ghost of andrea dworkin.

all together now: 'ooooh, i'm on tonight, you know my hips don't lie and i'm starting to feel it's right.' i can't even remember the rest. something about having an infection, or giving your dad an erection, or something. slore. but rilly, you guys. you guys. come on. my hips don't fucking LIE? this is bullshit! and i don't want to hear about subtlety or bodily tropes or disingenuity. there are enough of us stubborn, honest prick teases out there that you should know by now where you stand. despite low slung jeans, affection, despite even enthusiastic kissing, despite all the spanglish you can chew, despite waving arms, humping chairs, whatever, you may go home unsatisfied while i happily and guiltlessly masturbate in my bathroom. that is just how it is, mr jean. i'm sorry.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAbNWNn5DuE&search=wyclef%20shakira

BUNNY CARE!

Thank you so much for agreeing to look after the bunny while I’m away. I’ve covered my bed with the shower curtain so that he can safely be left in there while you’re having open house.
Bunny needs feeding and watering twice a day. If he is stressed by my absence, or acting up, I have left some of his tonic powder in the cupboard next to his food. This is to be mixed with his water, and it makes him feel better, but it’s rich, so he doesn’t need it every day. A couple of days in a row at most.

His box needs emptying every couple of days. It’s lined with newspapers, which are in the drawer under the fridge, and filled with hay, which is in a bag on top of the fridge.
My plants need watering every other day as well (particularly the one on the table by the window, which is a sulker).

The best way to keep him happy is just to pay him lots of attention. He likes to just show you things he's doing. He'll nudge you to let you know he wants you. Sometimes he wants fuss, other times just to show you stuff. He refers a lot.

I really appreciate your help and will bring you back something fab from San Francisco. I’ll miss you and be thinking of you in the run up to open house. I’m looking forward to seeing zest when I get back.

My email is ellencherry@gmail.com. I’ll check it regularly. I can still be contacted on my mobile, 07XXX XXX XXX. Or you can call me where I’m staying on 001 XXX XXX XXXX. If you need help with the bunny, my friend russell has offered to be a contact here: his number is 07XXX XXX XXX. Bunny knows him very well and he’s happy to come in and feed, fuss, or change the box if you can’t. The vet, Phil at St Francis Veterinary Centre, knows I'm going away and I've arranged for them to bill me for any treatment bunny may need in my absence, so don't hesistate to take him if anything's wrong. The number is 01273 770800.

Hope everything goes fab for you while I’m away.

xoxoxpetra

you know what i didn't do last night?

i didn't go and watch some fucking novelty band at the freebutt. what is happening to twee and alt pop? charity shop knitwear used to be enough outsider signifier for everyone. now nobody's interested unless the band is made up of flute-eating quadruplets from fuckstick, maine, and one of them's mute. i blame the danielsen familie. i bet joanna newsom gets offered extra to bring along a choir of oompaloompas on BV.

once, i was helping with the sound for a gig at the hanbury; it was jorge someone - the man from neutral milk hotel - and he had set himself up as some sort of one twat band. he was playing the banjo and kicking occasionally at drums scattered around him on the floor; he was decked out in a hat with bells on, and he had erected a ridiculously tall stand next to him and adorned it with a small cymbal which he would periodically headbutt. we had to hide behind the desk during sound check, we were laughing so much.

you don't get enough savant for your idiot these days. last night's offering at the freebutt - which i ignored - was named something like tammy and the flids. apparently their drummer doesn't drum, she tapdances near a microphone! jesus, mary and joseph. this is not innovation in music, this is the finger in a matchbox trick. ask jamie brogden, aged 8 at the time, what happens when you show me the finger in a matchbox trick. i bet you he remembers.

so, fearing imbroglios, i instead spent the evening practicing with russell. our band is fun. he plays guitar, without the aid of a false arm or a windsock, and i play drums, sitting down, with drumsticks i bought at the drum cavern. we are not previously conjoined twins, nor are we from the boondocks. we are called 'in love with all my friends', and our demo will be available from me in about 3 weeks, unless one of turns mute first. thank you.

Sex with famous people

1) Tony Hart. All silvery and distinguished, but not in a posh way, with his artisan-class economy of gesture, his hesitant voice, and the exactitude of his language. I want this most about him: that he's the first of his family to go to university, and the best loved of all his brothers. Now that all children's TV presenters are methylated stage school fags, it's hard to imagine how his genteel, mostly silent art show Take Hart, could have transfixed so many . As a child, I watched it with fervent attention. He martyred me every week; I couldn't draw. I was too easily distracted by colour.

The pavement art of cheats was splayed across the set walls, and the gallery theme choreographed him pacing past the work of my rivals, ages 7 and under, 8-11, 12 and over, and watching him, even aged 7 and under, I'd sit there getting all swampy in my little kid knickers while he walked slowly around that white space talking about foreshortening. I so want it to be my turn: his look on my body like a blush, noting its shortcomings and revelling in its sucesses, in his careful way; and occasionally, oh, god! he brushes a finger down my lines to demonstrate how perfect they are, and the gallery theme is playing, and it's playing, chilly vibraphone scratches down my back and thighs, and the white of the walls gulps down hot fear.

2) Eric Clapton: I bite my thumbnail off and spit it at him.

3) One night, I'll tire of waiting, and I'll put on the green dress I hid at the bottom of my trunk, and I'll get on a train and go to Robert Plant's gloucestershire fucking estate and rise up out of his lake at dawn. He'll hear me snap the necks of his dogs on waking and load his gun, but I'll be inexorable and terrible and covered in duckweed and my hair will stream ancient water and there will be a terrible consequence in my mien, and stuff. Then his wife and I will raid the fridge for things to stick up his butt, and he'll have the sex change he always wanted and join Le Tigre.

4) It's 1970 and I'm at a party at the Maharishi's New York penthouse - all the hippies are frauds, and I'm muttering into my 4th cape cod. I'm in the library, hiding from Joan Baez, who cornered me boozily behind the piano and made me blush by asking me if I could full lotus. Her breath smelled sort of muddy, and she stared at me after I walked away from her, which I know is the truth because people were smirking all the way to the bar.

The library door swishes open. Of course it does. Nothing creaks here; the apartment is kept in a state of perpetual relaxation by reverent oompaloompas, groomed like a pedigree dog. The entire place has a round, fecund feeling, in fact. I suspect the library of housing larval homunculi. Maybe Joan pups them, whelping out fat brown ova in glorious full fucking lotus. I actually have to shake my head to dismiss that one before I turn around.

Praise god and all his angels, it's only George Harrison. I couldnt have taken one more verse of Joan's predatory hysteria. I say something stupid about expecting someone else, but he saw me relax already, and he takes a big gulp of his drink. He looks almost sulky! 'Mr Harrison? are you okay?' I ask, and he walks over to me and my back is against the bookshelves, and, oh, man - then - something so unexpected happens that it actually warps time, and I can't feel things in their proper order -

His face near mine makes no sense. I think there's a cloud behind my eyes. It's there even before George wordlessly slides the olives off the cocktail stick and pushes them up my nostrils. Before the reek of their vinegar fills my sinuses, before he pulls down my dress, pulls down my body and cockslaps my streaming eyes - turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream -before breathlessness and books falling down, and my lungs bursting and his cock in my throat. It is not dying. it is not dying. my eyes run vinegar. There's cum deep in my chest. Now that, Joan, is what we call transcenmotherfuckingdental.