69 Things to Do With a Dead Princess Read online

  69 THINGS TO DO WITH A DEAD PRINCESS

  Stewart Home was born in South London in 1962. When he was 16 he held down a factory job for a few months, an experience that led him to vow he’d never work again. After dabbling in rock journalism and music, Home switched his attention to the art world in the 1980s and now writes novels as well as cultural commentary.

  First published in Great Britain in 2002 by

  Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street,

  Edinburgh EH1 1TE

  This edition first published in the United States of America in 2003

  This digital edition first published in 2012 by Canongate Books Copyright © Stewart Home, 2002

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library ISBN 1 84195 381 4

  eISBN 978 0 85786 761 2

  Typeset by Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

  Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland

  Hobbity-style map drawn by Charly Murray

  www.canongate.tv

  ‘I regard truth as a divine ventriloquist. I care not from whose mouth the sounds are supposed to proceed, if only the words are audible and intelligible.’

  Coleridge, Biographia Literaria.

  ‘I am a machine condemned to devour books.’

  Marx in a letter to his daughter Laura dated 11 April 1868.

  CONTENTS

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  ONE

  A MAN who no longer called himself Callum came to Aberdeen intent on ending his life. He wanted to die but not by his own hand. That was where I came in. He wanted me to help him act out his death. A psychodrama. When I met Callum he told me his name was Alan.

  It was a cold overcast day. I’d slept late and abandoned my plan to go to the beach. I liked going to the beach. Even in winter. Even at night. But not when it was wet. I went to Union Street. I didn’t have anything better to do. The shops were filled with commodities but they bored me. Books. Records. The Aberdeen merchants didn’t cater for tastes like mine. I relied on secondhand stores, mail order, presents from friends, trips to Edinburgh and London. Things could have been worse. I could have been living in Dundee where the rents were cheaper but the city centre was a pedestrianised shopping nightmare. Aberdeen was better, there was the beach, Union Street and oil money. If Brighton was San Francisco on the South Coast, then Aberdeen was Los Angeles on the North Sea.

  It was a dreary mid-week lunchtime and the pubs were unusually empty. I took advantage of this to avoid my friends. I went to The Grill, a very traditional bar. I’d not been to The Grill before despite the place being legendary. The old men who patronised The Grill were reputed to dislike women drinkers. I’d heard the management were endlessly deferring the installation of a ladies’ toilet. This ensured the regulars enjoyed a predominantly male environment.

  I walked in to a dozen hostile stares. Alan looked up from a book, waved at me and said afternoon. I misheard what he said, it wasn’t quite 12.30 and I thought Alan was saying my name. Anna Noon. I didn’t recognise Alan but I thought he must know me. I went and sat with him. He got up and bought me a drink. I looked at the book he was reading. However Introduced to the Soles, new poetry from Niall Quinn, Nick Macias and Nic Laight. Alan returned with my gin and a fresh pint of heavy. I asked him to read me his favourite poem in However Introduced to the Soles and he recited the contents page from memory.

  I added tonic to the gin and raised the glass to my lips. Old men were swimming before my eyes. A struggle to keep up with the times was written across their blank faces. The town had changed. Oil had changed the town. The old men drank slowly, preserving as best they could their pensions and their memories. Things were different in the old days. Oil had turned their world upside down. House prices had gone through the roof. Their children had moved away. They couldn’t afford to live in the city. Aberdeen had changed. I didn’t want to speak. I didn’t want Alan to speak. We both had English accents. Neither of us was involved with the rigs.1

  I finished my drink and suggested we relocate to one of the pubs near the station. My shout. Alan said we could go back to his place. I didn’t know if this was a suggestion or a threat. He had a bottle of Springbank. I didn’t know what it was. A Campbeltown malt, he explained. Alan also had a bottle of gin. That was good enough for me. It was raining. Neither of us had an umbrella. Alan paid for a taxi to Union Grove. It wasn’t far. East of the big detached houses favoured by the oil men. The door to the tenement needed a new coat of paint. The stairs needed sweeping. Alan’s flat was on the first floor.

  We went through the door. I’d never seen anything like it. There were books everywhere. Bookcases, even in the hallway, covered every inch of wall space, from the floor to the ceiling. But there wasn’t enough shelf space for the books. There were piles of books lying all over the floor. Old newspapers too. Alan led me into the living room. It was filled with books. I was surprised by the furniture, carpets and curtains. Brown leather and chrome. Brown shag pile. Blue velvet. Someone had spent money on the flat. Although the colour combinations left a lot to be desired, I was envious. Take away the books and the flat would have been fabulous. It was much better than my bedsit.

  I gestured at the books, piled high on shelves, on a table, on the floor. What is this? Alan told me it was an occult memory system. Then he left the room. There were letters at my feet. Bills. They were addressed to Callum MacDonald, Flat 3, 541 Holloway Road, London. Alan came back with whisky and gin, ice and a lemon. Alan was organised, even if his flat was a mess. What was he wearing? If I’d known I was going to write about him later, I’d have made some notes at the time. He didn’t like to stand out in a crowd. Alan often wore black Levi’s, lace-up shoes, an open shirt and a dark jacket. Since it was cold, he’d have been wearing a V-neck jumper. He had several raincoats, all dark. He’d have taken off his coat and jumper once we were inside the flat. The central heating was on and double glazing kept the rooms warm.

  I took a sip of gin and asked Alan what he did. He told me he read and that when he’d finished reading, he’d die. I asked him why he’d come to Aberdeen. He told me he’d inherited the flat and the books it contained. When I asked if his parents were rich he laughed. The flat hadn’t belonged to his family, it had been owned by an older woman who’d become very fond of him. Alan kicked over a pile of books and told me he’d only been in Aberdeen a few days. He wanted to clear the flat, the books irritated him. I suggested that Alan try the Old Aberdeen Bookshop, an emporium close to the university that specialised in quality secondhand stock. Alan laughed. He was going to read every one of the books before he got rid of them.

  Alan picked up the paperbacks he’d kicked over. A selection of titles by Erich Fromm. He told me the books were rubbish. He hurriedly read aloud from the introductions to The Art of Loving, The Revolution of Hope, To Have or to Be and The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. In each introduction Fromm repeated himself, apologising for the repetition of material between his new book and his previous texts but justifying it on the grounds that it provided the necessary framework from which the reader could understand the fresh insights his latest work contained. Alan asked me if I was familiar with Fromm’s work. No. He gave me Escape from Freedom and told me to keep it. He had an English edition of the book put out by RKP. The title was Fear of Freedom but the text was identical to
the American edition with the original title. I have both books now. Soon after we met, Alan started selling the books he’d read to the Old Aberdeen Bookshop. I’d go over to the shop once or twice a week, picking up whatever Alan off-loaded.

  I asked Alan how old he was. He claimed to be 36. At first I thought he was joking. I thought he might be two or three years older than me. We got along easily enough, maybe it was the gin. It didn’t feel like there was a 16-year age gap between us. I asked Alan if he wanted to have sex. He led me through to the bedroom and asked me if I’d mind being tied up. I was reluctant until he promised not to hurt me. Alan tied my hands behind my back. He put a blindfold over my eyes, then placed a hood over my head. He rolled me onto my stomach and touched my spine and the tops of my legs. He touched the back of my knees. Put my toes in his mouth and sucked them. He crawled all over me. Moved my limbs around and licked under my armpits. By the time he got me to shift my arse and shoved two fingers into my cunt, I was dripping wet.

  I suspect Alan wasn’t using a condom when he fucked me. If he was it burst, because afterwards I could feel his come dripping out of my cunt. Alan threw a blanket over me and then he left. I don’t know how long I lay there. Alan had told me not to move and that he would be back. I was aroused. I drifted in and out of sleep. Erotic dreams. Erotic thoughts. I trusted Alan. I liked the sensation of his come dripping out of my cunt. I liked feeling helpless and I was overcome with excitement when I heard Alan’s voice again after what seemed an infinity of sleepless dreams and dreamless sleep.

  I thought it was Alan fingering my cunt. Climbing on top of me. Ramming his big stiff cock up my creamy hole. I thought it was Alan because all the while I could hear his voice. He told me that I was the best-looking girl in the world. That I really turned him on. That he wanted to get me pregnant. Alan fell silent but I could feel hot breath on the back of my neck. Then something strange happened. There were two hands beneath me, fondling my breasts. A different pair of hands removed my hood and stroked my hair. This second set of hands lifted my head up, fingers found their way into my mouth. Then the fingers were joined by a cock. I was still being fucked doggie-style from behind. The fingers wet with my saliva were playing with my hair. I didn’t know who, couldn’t see who, I was giving a blow job.

  Fingers fumbled with the blindfold, removed it. I looked up and saw Alan. Now I knew who I was sucking but I didn’t know who was fucking me. With the corner of my eye I could see a ventriloquist’s dummy. I’d noticed it earlier, when I first entered the bedroom, before I’d been tied up and blindfolded.2 I was coming, I could taste Alan’s spunk in my mouth, I felt the other man’s prick harden and then he shot his load. Alan withdrew his cock from between my lips and put the hood back over my head. I could hear someone dressing, they left. Alan was undoing the rope that bound my wrists. We curled up together, under the blankets, fell asleep.

  We didn’t doze for long. Alan woke me getting out of bed. I watched him dress. A book-lined wall behind him. When he started pulling books from shelves I hauled myself out of bed. Alan told me that you had to treat books well, move them around, show an interest, or they’d die just like plants. He complained that he’d expected to find something more than commercially published paperbacks. His friend had been a magus and although there were occult titles, these were vastly outnumbered by philosophy, politics, literature, history, sociology and plenty of other topics. We went through to the sitting room and had another drink. I picked up the Erich Fromm book that Alan had given me. My host said Fromm criticises mechanisation precisely because his literary technique is mechanised. At that moment I wasn’t certain I understood what Alan meant, but as I acquired more of his books I realised there was nothing much to understand.

  Alan criticised Fromm for denouncing a mechanical culture of death so that it might be endlessly reproduced under the rubric of life. Alan compared Fromm’s conception of a social character to Spengler’s agrarian mysticism and the claim that there are distinct social types to be found in the countryside and the city. When I said I didn’t know what he was talking about, Alan suggested I take his copy of Decline of the West if I wished to waste a few hours with right-wing froth. Alan picked up Fromm’s The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. I have his 1977 Penguin paperback edition in front of me as I write. He opened the book at page 440 and pointed to what Fromm had to say about the slogan ‘Long live death!’ Alan found a copy of Alexander Herzen’s From the Other Shore and pointed out that the Russian populist used the slogan ‘Vive la mort! And may the future triumph!’ at the end of a letter written in Paris on 27 July 1848.3

  Alan criticised Fromm for understanding neither the historical genesis of the slogan ‘Long live death!’ nor its meaning. He pulled a copy of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables from a shelf and showed me a passage where the crowds manning the Parisian barricades of 1832 are depicted shouting ‘Long live death!’ He made me look at Marx’s two texts about 1848, The Class Struggles in France and The Eighteenth Brumaire. He stressed that the latter work begins with the famous observation that history repeats itself, the first time as farce, the second as tragedy, and according to Alan this is exactly what happened in Spain during the civil war. Then he picked up Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man and drew my attention to a quote at the beginning of chapter 13 from Hegel’s Phenomenology concerning the master/slave dialectic. Alan muttered that even a right-wing cretin like Fukuyama had advanced further in his superficial reading of Hegel than Fromm.

  Alan kicked several Fromm books across the room. Dismissing them and their author for ignoring the death of Socrates as an act of scapegoating that gave birth to Western philosophy. Alan insisted that any philosopher or occultist worth their salt could tell you that death is the supplement of life, just as life is the supplement of death, that we only start living in death. The ability to imagine our own death not only makes us human, it may yet make us divine. Fromm imagined he was a Marxist and yet he completely ignored what Hegel had to say about death. After observing that even Norman O. Brown was preferable to Fromm, Alan picked up his coat and suggested we went out and got something to eat.

  We went to La Bonne Baguette and ate French onion soup with bread. Alan drank espresso, I drank cappuccino. I asked Alan how many people he knew in Aberdeen. He said he didn’t know anyone, I was the first person he’d befriended, he’d only been in the city a couple of days. If Alan didn’t know anyone, I wanted to know who he’d got to fuck me. He said Dudley had fucked me. Dudley who? Dudley Standing. Who was Dudley Standing? The ventriloquist’s dummy I’d seen in the bedroom, Alan had brought it up from London. I told Alan not to be ridiculous. Alan asked if I’d believe he’d just gone and grabbed some 20-year-old boy off the street. I found this idea very sexy. I could feel my knickers getting wet.

  After our soup we went to the Prince Of Wales. We met some guys I knew there. Alan wanted to leave after one drink. Gareth told me he’d spent the day writing an essay. Alan said that both sperm and ink flowed out. From semen to semantics, he was alluding to what we’d being doing since lunchtime. We tried the Blue Lamp. Suzy and Jill waved us across to their table. Suzy had just split up with her boyfriend, Jill was trying to comfort her. We sat with them for a while. Alan asked me if I’d ever gone down on another woman. I said no. He asked me if I’d read 69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess by K. L. Callan. Again my answer was negative.

  After a while Suzy and Jill were drawn into our conversation. Chitchat mainly about films and books but somehow the talk became serious. Jill said that Lynne Tillman was the best living writer she’d read. Alan observed that ‘best’ wasn’t an appropriate term to apply to literature. Then he began talking about Angus Wilson’s endless and unintentional deconstruction of literary form. According to Alan, by reproducing an apparently banal set of values Wilson was able to illustrate what he was unable to declare – that there were no foundations to knowledge. The gap between what Wilson set out to do, and what he actually did, exposed literary disc
ourse for what it was – a fable without beginning or end that presupposed its own origins in a mythological superiority to other textual forms. Angus Wilson and William McGonagal were the only two writers Alan would recommend without hesitation to anyone who solicited his opinion about what they should read.

  I went to the toilet with Jill. She’d overheard Alan telling me earlier that he’d like to get off with her. Jill dared me to undo Alan’s flies and take his cock out, so that she could see it. It seemed like a good idea at the time. We sat back down at the table. Alan was snogging Suzy. He had his hand inside her knickers. I put my hands on his crotch, undid the button fly on his jeans, took his prick out. It was soft and squidgy but quickly hardened in my hand. Jill stroked Alan’s erect tool and it sprang up out of my palm. We giggled, then put the phallus away, I was worried someone outside our little circle might notice I’d taken it out. Jill suggested we go back to her place. We all agreed so Alan bought some carry-out beers and we split.

  Jill shared a flat with a girl called Karen. Jill’s flatmate was asleep. We were drunk, still drinking from the carry-out cans. Alan ordered Suzy to have sex with me on the carpet. As I undressed, I told Jill to take Alan’s pants down and give him a blow job. I lay naked on a rug in front of a gas fire, clasped Suzy against my chest. I ran my hands down Suzy’s back. Looked over to the sofa. Alan still had his shirt on but he was naked below the waist. Jill was running her tongue up and down his length. Alan was swigging from a can of lager and looking at me looking at him. I put my hands between Suzy’s legs, she was wet. I fingered her clit, then slid a digit into her cunt. It was warm, it felt familiar, like an old friend. Suzy had an orgasm, then wriggled off my hand and went down on me.

  I looked at Alan. He was excited. He removed his cock from Jill’s mouth. He walked over to the fireplace and pulled Suzy’s legs apart. She lifted her head and gasped with pleasure as he entered her. Then she lowered her head and licked my bits. Jill dropped her pants and hitched up her skirt. She walked over to me and sat on my face. I parted her beef curtains with my tongue. She was warm, moist and tasted of hyacinths. An orgasm exploded in the centre of my brain and rippled through my body. I was helpless, happy, falling. I was washing my face in Jill’s moisture. Jill stood up. Alan was still fucking Suzy. Jill pulled Alan from his mount, pushed him face down on the floor, rolled him over. Guided Alan’s erection between her moist lips, then started gyrating.