This is the Ritual Read online

  ‘No. Only women.’

  ‘That’s even creepier.’

  I shook my head. ‘I’ve always been relaxed around women in that way. It’s easy for me to be with them, even to stay in the same bedroom as a woman without there being anything sexual to it. I slept in the same bed as my sister till we were eleven or twelve.’

  She nodded. ‘And so what’s the second part of the project?’

  ‘That’s when the subject and I exchange beds. So, she spends a few nights in my place, and I sleep in her bed. I record myself as I sleep. I have cameras poised around the bed to take photos of me at intervals throughout the night. Later, I digitally merge the sounds of myself and the woman, the subject. Then I merge the photos. The faces blend together. So do the bodies. Finally I sequence the sounds with the photos. When people are stripped down to that level of intimacy, there isn’t much difference between men and women.’

  ‘Do you see yourself as a woman?’ Alicia said.

  ‘You mean in life?’

  She laughed. ‘No, in the pictures.’

  I smiled. ‘Something like that. It can, in fact, be a bit creepy. But that’s part of the fascination. Once, when I merged the photos, I looked exactly like my sister. It was uncanny. It was like . . . I felt like I was seeing her ghost.’

  I sensed she was curious enough to be my next subject, but I thought it shrewd to wait a while, let her come around in her own time.

  Alicia kept seeing Halid, though still no more than once a week. The sex was exciting, yet she never felt any danger that it would lead to more than that, that they would fall for each other. She became friendlier with a short, dark-haired girl from the restaurant called Monica, who was working there for a while before moving to London, where her boyfriend had gone some months previously. ‘I haven’t been entirely faithful to him,’ Monica told Alicia one night when they were having a beer in the restaurant after closing up.

  ‘Has he been faithful to you?’ asked Alicia.

  Monica shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Probably not. I don’t want to know. It’s something we talked about, that it might happen, and if it did, it’s better not to know. Anyway, I think about this question, and you know, I reached the conclusion that there is a higher law than monogamy. A higher law than monogamy and fidelity. Sometimes it seems to me that the sin is not to be unfaithful, but to not be unfaithful. I mean, in certain situations.’

  ‘Do you really believe that?’ said Alicia.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Monica, laughing. ‘Sometimes.’

  Monica took Alicia out clubbing. They would meet beforehand at Monica’s apartment to drink a couple of beers and smoke some grass with her friends, who gamely encouraged Alicia’s middling Spanish and fledgling Catalan. One night they took Ecstasy before they headed out to the club. Alicia had only ever tried the drug once, years earlier, but it had been an ugly night that ended in an awful fight with her ex-boyfriend, who had grown jealous. This time, with Monica, the drug carried Alicia on to a plateau of bliss that, at twenty-nine, she was astonished to have never before attained or even suspected was pos-sible. The club was a cavern of white lights, where beautiful bodies twisted to music that sounded richer and deeper than any Alicia had ever heard. She smiled at everyone, radiating goodwill. She forgave her ex all his lies and lack of self-control. She remembered Monica’s talk of a higher law and saw how it might be true. Dancing, she closed her eyes and felt herself into her ex-boyfriend’s body, into his mind, when he had made love to another woman. She felt very near to him. Monica appeared out of the crowd and put her arms on Alicia’s shoulders. Alicia turned to her, grinning, and they kissed one another on the lips. Monica laughed and merged back into the crowd. Later, the two of them were dancing with a tall, slim young man who had his shirt buttoned low and dark hair on his chest, a grey-black trilby on his head. The girls took more Ecstasy and gave one to the guy. Then the three of them were in a taxi, laughing, kissing, pointing out the window. Whenever the man had nothing to say, he laughed and slapped his thigh, and put his arm around either Monica or Alicia’s waist. He took a selfie of the three of them in the back of the cab. At Monica’s place, she put on some music and they all got into bed together. The curtains were open and blue light from the street illumined their bodies. As they caressed one another, Alicia found she mostly wanted to kiss Monica, but Monica kept kissing the young guy. Alicia either couldn’t remember his name or had never learned it in the first place. Grinning, the man asked the girls to kiss one another while he jerked off. Then he licked Alicia out while Monica sucked and kneaded Alicia’s breasts. He wanted to take another selfie of the three of them in the bed, but Monica chucked his phone on to a pile of clothes by the window and started to suck him off. At several points the situation became precarious as one of the girls began to laugh; the man then had to coax them into continuing through caresses and whispers. As the night trailed on in a pornographic blur, Alicia found that Monica and the young man were becoming exclusively concerned with one another. The man was now on his knees and licking Monica out while she clasped her tits in her palms, moaning softly. His dick had gone limp but he jerked it off till it hardened again. Alicia was about to get up to leave, but the guy reached out, not raising his face from Monica’s cunt, and drew her in. He guided her hand behind him, gesturing for Alicia to penetrate him with her finger. She did, and as he kept licking Monica out, the young man whimpered and growled, still pulling himself off with one hand. Monica came loudly. Then the young man came – Alicia could feel his sphincter throbbing against her knuckle. He folded down on to Monica’s belly with a shudder, sliding off Alicia’s finger. He and Monica lay coiled together like that, their fingers entwined. A few moments later, quietly rising from the bed to leave the room, Alicia saw that dark brown spots of shit were flecked over a portion of the sheets. They looked like blood.

  She sat out on the sitting-room balcony with the lights off, thinking about what had happened. Now and then she could hear noises coming through the wall from the bedroom. Across the city, a plane was flying low and she watched till it vanished beneath the skyline. She made herself a cup of camomile tea. Soon it was dawn. Alicia showered and got back into her clothes, which were pungent with chemical sweat. Then she quietly opened the bedroom door and looked at the couple – they were naked and sleeping like infants, hand in hand on the strewn and spotted bedding. Alicia closed the door and left the apartment. She hailed a taxi on the awakening street and went home.

  In October, Alicia received an email from her ex-boyfriend – the first time he had contacted her since the separation. He said he was sorry, profoundly sorry; he said he had been looking deeply into himself and at the pain he had caused, not only to her but throughout his life to those who loved him, and was ready to change. He said he wanted her back. He said he fully understood why she had left, and would never hold it against her, but now things would be different. He said he was ready to be a father, if that was what she wanted.

  For days after reading the email, Alicia’s emotions were in turmoil. Suddenly it seemed so appealing: to get out of Barcelona, this city she had landed in with no purpose other than to be away from Dublin; to go back to the life she’d had before, but altered now, with greater power on her side. Then the weekend came, and she met Halid for a drink. They drank more than usual, laughed easily, and talked more intimately than ever – lacking any sense of consequence, Alicia felt she could be as honest as she liked with Halid. She told him about her ex, his affairs and one-night stands, how she no longer believed there was one person with whom you ought to share your life, but perhaps many, or no one in particular.

  ‘Were you ever unfaithful to your boyfriend?’ Halid asked.

  Alicia trailed a painted fingernail down the side of her cocktail glass. ‘Once,’ she said.

  ‘And did he know about it?’

  ‘No. I never told him, even after I found out all he had done on me. Of course I considered telling him out of revenge, but I realised I just didn’
t want to. It was with one of his best friends, years ago now. It was just one night.’

  ‘And do you regret it?’ Halid asked.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Not then, really, and definitely not now.’

  They took a taxi to Halid’s place. At a certain point in the night, her brow mussed with sweat, Alicia leaned her face in close to Halid’s. She said to him, ‘There’s a thing I’ve always fantasised about doing, about a man doing to me, but I’ve always been too embarrassed to tell anyone.’

  Halid grinned. ‘Tell me,’ he said.

  The following morning, for the first time, Alicia felt tempted to stay for breakfast, maybe to go for a coffee and read the papers with Halid, then walk with him in the park or to the weekend market. She resisted the temptation. When she got back to her apartment, she deleted the email from her ex: she would stay in Barcelona for another year, maybe longer, maybe a lifetime. In the middle of the following week, she called Halid and explained that they would not be seeing one another again. Halid sounded deflated, but said he understood.

  Not long after that, Alicia texted me to say she wanted to be a subject in my ‘sleepy project’, as she put it. I spent a night at her apartment on the Calle de la Madera. As usual, I brought along a sleeping bag and pillow, to lay out on the floor in case I got tired. However, Alicia insisted that I should lie in the bed with her instead. By five a.m., I had taken almost two hundred photos. Alicia had shifted only once in the course of the night, turning from her side to lie face-up. Careful not to disturb the microphones that were directed at various parts of her body, I gently lifted the covers and lay down beside her. The bed was not large, and I inadvertently brushed her side with my hand. The warmth of her body triggered memories of my sister, from years ago. I imagined what would happen if Alicia were to wake and turn to me, or reach out her hand for mine beneath the covers. I found my heart was beating violently.

  Mexico Drift

  The last time I saw my friend Julian was the night we went to see Bret Easton Ellis give a talk at the London Literature Festival. Most of what follows I learned from a long, discomfiting email he sent me from Guatemala, out of the blue, more than a year later. I received that email seven months ago; I’ve heard nothing from him since.

  The Bret Easton Ellis talk took place on a drizzly autumn evening two nights after Julian’s twenty-ninth birthday, which meant we were both still a little fragile from the effects of all we’d consumed at the riotous party that had doubled as Julian’s big send-off (he had quit teaching at the language school where I’d met him and booked a one-way flight to Mexico).

  After the talk, over glasses of Leffe in a pub across the river from the South Bank, we discussed why seeing Ellis had been so dispiriting.

  ‘He’s the dead fucking end,’ Julian said.

  His voice was strained. He was drinking quickly to become interested in where he was.

  ‘You know what I mean? Being totally nihilistic is exciting when you’re younger, you can get away with it then. There’s still pleasure to be had in the destructive work. You haven’t yet had to live in the ruins. Most people who’re like that seem to wise up and realise it’s like this fire they’ve set in themselves, and if they don’t put it out by a certain age, they’ll be consumed. All that’ll be left are the ashes. That’s the impression Ellis gave me: a man of ashes. He showed too keen an interest in the fucking void, and eventually it started taking an interest in him. He should’ve killed himself twenty years ago.’

  I drank my beer as Julian peered into his glass. Memories reeled through my mind: Julian as the younger punk-intellectual, at war with everything, but winning the war and exhilarated by the fight; the acts of vandalism, all the fire-gutted cars and shattered McDonald’s windows. And later, the deepening sullenness, the first flirtations with far-right ideologies, the sneering disdain for younger advocates of the same radical leftism he had once espoused.

  We got mildly drunk that night, but Julian never shrugged off his lethargy. We said goodbye at Leicester Square tube station and I took a bus home through the rain. Less than a week later, Julian flew to Mexico City, alone.

  For his first few days there, he saw no one. He drank and wandered the streets, the city a choking carnival of noise and pollution. He hooked up with some punk contacts; vague friends of vague friends squatting in the city and playing in hardcore bands, angry and self-marginalised. An identical scene exists in hundreds of cities across the world, depressingly homogeneous and homogeneously depressed.

  Julian left the squat one morning without saying goodbye. He took a taxi to the bus station and began travelling around Mexico: Guadalajara, Chihuahua and Ciudad Juárez, where (he wrote) he hoped to witness a drug-war shootout, ‘or even be slain as an innocent bystander’. He found a dive bar in Juárez where he watched a gig, getting very drunk and taking speed given to him in the toilets by a young, almost effeminately beautiful punk, no older than nineteen. Julian’s Spanish was rudimentary but he befriended the Mexican and somehow explained that he didn’t have anywhere to stay that night. ‘No hay problema,’ said the young guy, ‘quédate conmigo.’ Julian didn’t remember getting home or into bed, but later he was woken by the young Mexican unbuttoning his boxers and taking his cock between his lips. Julian’s head spun as he ran his fingers through the guy’s curly black hair. He came into his mouth. The boy gently spat out the come on Julian’s leg and swirled his finger through it, like he was painting a spiral on his thigh. Then they kissed until Julian passed out.

  He left the next morning and took a bus to another town on the edge of the desert, where he hung around for a few days, reading Alberto Moravia in cafés and walking out at the periphery. He had sex again, this time with a barmaid from a place he got drunk in one night. She lived with her sister and Julian could hear her snoring in the next room while they fucked. They didn’t use a condom. Later in the night, as Julian lay in the dark with his eyes closed, he heard the woman weeping beside him. He left in the morning. After drifting for another couple of days, he arrived at Caborca, a desert city where more punks he knew were squatting. One of these was Sebastian, a Mexican who Julian had known six or seven years previously, in Madrid. Back then, Sebastian was twenty-five and still ablaze with youthful idealism. Now, that fire had all but burnt out. The world had not changed like Sebastian had demanded it to, but had moved on without him, brash with sunshine and thoughtless laughter. Like so many punks past their mid-twenties, Sebastian had begun to re-channel the aggression of his fading youth into a world-hating defeatism.

  The building that Sebastian and his friends were squatting was a crumbling four-storey block on the desert-whipped fringes of town. There was a large courtyard in the middle, hemmed in by the pale walls of the abandoned apartments. In this courtyard the punks would pass their days drinking, smoking weed, sometimes screwing one another, and playing music when they could be bothered to on battered amps, guitars and a rusted drum-kit, though their songs were all at least five years old and they seemed to spit out the rebellious, leftist lyrics with bitter irony (all of these punks were in their late twenties or older). The numbers fluctuated but there were usually around eight of them staying there. Mostly they were Latin Americans.

  Sebastian’s girlfriend, Erika, was an Argentinian who said she’d never go back to that country, so vacuously obsessed was it with image and surface. Julian would watch her through the late-afternoon tequila blur, when the sun’s glare dragged all of existence out into the open, groaning, exposed and humiliated. Erika seemed strangely indifferent to Sebastian, who grew more sullen and withdrawn as the days and weeks piled up, loitering at the far end of the courtyard with his dark curly hair and his Misfits T-shirt. The couple had an open relationship, but neither Erika nor Sebastian ever seemed bothered to fuck any of the other punks, perhaps because the permutations had already been exhausted. After he’d been there for a couple of weeks, Julian followed Erika into the shade of one of the rarely used rooms, up on the third floor. There was nothing in
the room but a bare mattress. They fucked for hours in the hot afternoon as Sebastian and the others drank in the courtyard below. Between bouts of screwing, while he and Erika took hits on a plastic bong, Julian could hear Sebastian’s voice, unnaturally loud, sometimes igniting into harsh and mirthless laughter. Then there would be silence for a while, the nullifying presence of the desert drifting over the apartment block like a cloud of sand or slow gas.

  ‘What do you think is up with Sebastian these days?’ said Julian as they lay side-by-side, stoned and separate, gazing at the ceiling while intermittent shrieks rose up from the courtyard.

  ‘Nothing’s up with him,’ said Erika. ‘He’s unhappy. Why wouldn’t he be?’

  Julian snorted. ‘What, cause he never managed to change the world? He needs to grow up. I don’t have any pity on him.’

  ‘You don’t have pity on anyone. And no one has any pity on you.’ She laughed.

  ‘That’s not true,’ said Julian, tiredly. In the courtyard someone played a grindcore band on an ancient cassette deck and Julian began to fuck Erica with his fingers, while she stroked his cock, gently at first but soon tugging violently, so that they came almost together, juices spilt on leather and dust as the slow, turgid warp of grindcore bounded off the walls.

  He stayed on in the squatted block. Days rolled past like the occasional, slow clouds in the desert sky, or the lone cars on the highway that trailed silently to the horizon.A guy called Raoul came up from Mexico City with a great deal of speed. For three days they all stayed up getting wrecked. It was fun, like the old days. On the second night of the speed blitz, Julian screwed Erika again. This time it was vicious, both of them snarling, biting and clawing, the border between lust and battery obliterated. ‘Spit on me,’ she hissed as he held her legs back and plunged into her, wanting to stab and maim and lacerate. His saliva slapped the skin above her eye. She punched him hard in the jaw and he slapped her with equal force so that she let out an involuntary whimper. He felt his cock throbbing hard inside her. At one point Julian turned and saw someone standing in the doorway, the figure indistinct in the gloom. He thought it was Sebastian but couldn’t be sure. After a while the figure turned away, indifferent, and Julian gushed into the heat of Erika’s pussy, then collapsed on to her chest, wheezing as arrows of light flashed on the screen of his eyelids. He felt alone and serene in the empty drift of time. Nothing had ever mattered and why should it now.