The Quaint Art of Seduction

Another teaser from my forthcoming novel

My novel is an autobiographic tale of when I went to Thailand to get off heroin and catch up with a girl I fell in love with during a holiday there a few years earlier. But why did I decide to get clean? Why then? Towards the start of the novel a few close shaves with normal life seem to hold the clue to such decision making, or its timing at least. Here’s one example of such a time. Living in Soho, I was teased into giving life a go. Stupid, I know.

The next night I ventured back out into the world, motivated by what counted for the most profound human contact I’d had in months – that is, more than none - I was suddenly and surprisingly on a quest to do life. I managed to pick up a very pretty girl in The French House on Dean St. Not a place known for pretty girls, more a place known for alcoholics and drug addicts – very few of whom are pretty – or the odd C-list actor, still dining out on those three lines they had in Inspector Morse circa ‘92, The French House providing such a result seemed to support my newfound (although still somewhat suspicious) motivation to Just Do It ™.  

A therapist once told me that if I were to walk into a room with twenty women, within five minutes I’d be flirting with the one that would do me the most damage. I understood her point, it echoed many a concrete situation across which I’d dragged my desiring body. Although it lost a certain amount of credibility while I fucked her arse, bent over the balcony wall of her husband’s country house the following weekend. Nonetheless, never one to learn from the obvious I was onto the damage-siren in The French House like a fly to a bug-light. To have placed herself in such an environment, her breasts raised, front, center, and virtually naked; her heels and somewhat ungulate posture a story of absence and loss just waiting for some equally broken man to wander in and unconsciously agree to terms, I realised my collection of dirty secrets might actually score some sexy points. And after a few trauma extinguishing drinks, us both giving a good impression of being relatively normal people, I asked her if she wanted to come back to my flat for some cocaine. They always do. Cocaine is like that. Dull, boring people, or damaged exciting people, (actually, the only real criteria is a sense of being less than – however it might manifest) can hoof it up their beak, and for a few short minutes feel like someone worth knowing – occasionally even, someone worth being. The sad truth of course is they already are worth both knowing and being – everyone is really, if you can just get them to be honest. But cocaine actually only further separates them from that reality, denying them the human connection the need and plunging them further into self-deception, social failure, and fear. Needless to say, perhaps, she wasn’t too impressed when the aforementioned ‘cocaine’ turned out to be crack cocaine. It amazes me how many middle-class coke-fiends get all shitty about crack. Not that they’d ever dare admit it, but just under the surface of who they pretend to be, they think crack is for blacks, and as much as they have the BLM symbol peppered around their social media, they don’t want to get too close, that is - close at all. Nonetheless after a couple of half pints of Gin from my refrigerator, she succumbed, and even chased some heroin on a foil for afters. Then – predictably – after turning into an apparition of herself and fixing her gaze on a familiar figure of bad decisions on some absent horizon she knew the child in her always inhabited, she puked. And wow did she puke, like an angry vomit making machine that had just kicked into gear after months of poor maintenance – a portal of puke you could say - summoned open by the darkness of my lumpen, sedative-addled desire. Accompanied by a grating death-rattle, filthy muck just gushed out of her face into my bath, with a spatter circle of around one and a half meters. I put a caring, cold, hand on her shoulder, working out when and how I was going to get rid of her. She shit herself too, a vile, loose-arsed, watery expulsion that shot out from under her denim shorts and down her previously very attractive bare legs. She didn’t even flinch, lost in a crack, gin, and heroin stupor that had stolen from her the ability to care about anything, she just let the soupy, brown liquid run down her legs, the odd solid particle losing momentum and adhering to her calf muscles and ankles. A breath, a trace of the need to survive, a slow assessment of her environment... And then the hole in her undead face opened wide again, pukeless and submissive – a yawn of sorts, a tired of life yawn, one with gooey saliva hanging from her lips and snot swinging from her nose. ‘Can I stay here?’ she said, in a shaky, shivering, and more a statement than a question kind of voice. And as if to convince me it was a good idea, half-conscious, she slumped her squelching arse down on the toilet seat, undid my button fly, pulled out my unwashed penis, and fell forward, out cold, struggling to breathe as her pukey lips pushed against my soft and totally uninterested cock. I still thought about it though. But everyone’s got limits. 

Thank you for reading.

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Chris Dangerfield