The Mammoth Book of the Best of Best New Erotica

Entertaining Mr Orton ^{Poppy Z. Brite}

London, 1 August 1967

“Have you been reading my diary?”

Kenneth looks up from the baboon’s head he is pasting onto the madonna’s body. He is standing on the bed to reach the upper part of his collage, which covers most of the wall, and the top of his bald cranium nearly brushes the pink and yellow tiles of the flat’s low ceiling. They have lived together in this tiny space in Islington for eight years.

“No, I have not been reading your diary,” Kenneth lies.

“Why not?”

“Because it would drive me to suicide.”

“Right,” says Joe with an edge of impatience in his voice. He has heard this threat many times before, in one form or another, and Kenneth realizes dimly that his lover either doesn’t believe it or just doesn’t care. That doesn’t mean Kenneth can make himself stop saying it, though.

“But if you won’t read my diary and you won’t talk to me,” Joe continues, “what’s the point of remaining in this relationship? You’re always telling everyone how I make your life miserable. What keeps you hanging about?”

Kenneth wipes glue from his fingers onto his pants, then turns and sits heavily on the bed. He took a number of Valium earlier in the day, but something in Joe’s voice pulls his brain out of its pleasant half-numb fog. They can still listen to each other, and even talk seriously when they really try.

Of course, most of the serious talk these days is about writing. Writing Joe’s plays, to be precise. The very same brilliant and successful plays that have made Joe’s name synonymous with decadence, black wit, and tawdry glamour as far as London was concerned. If the talk isn’t about Joe’s plays, it is about what they should do with all the money Joe’s plays are making. Joe spends most of it on toys: clothes, Polaroid cameras, holidays in Morocco.

“What surprises me,” Joe continues, “is that you haven’t killed me. I think you don’t leave or top yourself because you can’t stand the thought of anyone else having me.”

“Rubbish. All sorts of people have you.”

“Ah! You have been reading my diary.”

Kenneth rises up suddenly in one of his outbursts. “When you come home reeking of cheap aftershave, I don’t need your diary to tell me where you’ve been!”

Joe waves this away. “I mean, of anyone else having me permanently. And I can’t conceive of it either, honestly. It’s as if we’ve become inextricable.”

Suspicion flares in Kenneth’s mind. “Why are you talking about me killing you? Are you setting me up for something?”

Joe throws back his head and brays laughter, a sound which usually lessens Kenneth’s tension but now induces a smouldering rage. “What did you have in mind? Me setting you up for murder and slipping back off to Tangier? My family gets your fat arse thrown in prison and you do your De Profundis bit again? Oh, Ken…” Tears are spilling out of Joe’s eyes now, tears of laughter, the kind he used to cry in bed after a joyous orgasm. Kenneth remembers how they tasted, salt and copper on his tongue like blood.

“I think I could kill you,” he says, but Joe doesn’t hear him.

Tangier, 25 May 1967

Five English queens stoned on hash and Valium and Moroccan boy-flesh, sipping red wine on a café terrace against a blood-orange sky. Two American tourists, an older married couple, sitting nearby eavesdropping on the conversation and making their disapproval evident. Joe Orton lets his voice rise gradually until he is not so much shouting as projecting, trained Shakespearian actor that he is.

“He took me right up the arse, and afterwards he thanked me for giving him such a good fucking. They’re a most polite people. We’ve got a leopard-skin rug in the flat and he wanted me to fuck him on that, only I’m afraid of the spunk. You see, it might adversely affect the spots of the leopard.”

“Those tourists can hear what you’re saying,” one of the entourage advises. (Not Kenneth Halliwell; though he is present, he wouldn’t bother trying to curb Joe even if he wanted to.)

“I mean for them to hear,” Joe booms. “They have no right to be occupying chairs reserved for decent sex perverts… He might bite a hole in the rug. It’s the writhing he does, you see, when my prick is up him, that might grievously damage the rug, and I can’t ask him to control his excitement. It wouldn’t be natural when you’re six inches up the bum, would it?”

The Americans pay for their coffee and move away, looking as if they’ve had it considerably more than six inches up the bum – dry.

“You shouldn’t drive people like that away,” says the sensitive queen. “The town needs tourists.”

Joe sneers. He has practised it in the mirror. “Not that kind, it doesn’t. This is our country, our town, our civilization. I want nothing to do with the civilization they made. Fuck them! They’ll sit and listen to buggers’ talk from me and drink their coffee and piss off.”

“It seems rather a strange joke,” offers another member of the entourage timidly.

“It isn’t a joke. There’s no such thing as a joke,” says the author of the most successful comedy now playing in London’s West End.

Leicester, 2 August 1967

Joe leaves his father’s small threadbare house and walks two miles up the road to an abandoned barn, where a man he met in town earlier that day is waiting for him. He is in his home town, which he mostly loathes, to see a production of his play Entertaining Mr Sloane and fulfil family obligations. Just now he has some obligations of his own to fulfil.

Joe often likes to have one-off trysts with ugly men, men he finds physically appalling, but this one is a beauty: tall and smoothly muscled, with brown curly hair that tumbles into bright blue eyes, a thick Scottish accent, an exceedingly clever pair of hands, and a big-headed, heavily veined cock.

In the late afternoon shafts of sunlight that filter through the barn’s patched roof, they take turns kneeling on the dusty floor and sucking each other to a fever pitch. Then Joe braces himself against the wall and lets that fat textured cock slide deep into his arse, opening himself to this stranger in a way that he never can to Kenneth – not any more, not ever again.

London, 8 August 1967

Conversation after the lights are out:

“Joe?”

“…”

“Joe?”

“What?”

“Why did you ask me if I’d kill you?”

“I don’t know what you’re on about.”

“Do you want to die, Joe?”

“Do I…?” A sudden bray of laughter. “Hell, no! You twit, why would I want to die?”

“Then why did you bring it up?”

“Hm…” Joe is already falling back asleep. “I suppose I just wondered whether you were that far gone.”

His breathing deepens, slows. Joe is lying on his left side, his face to the wall. The collage spreads above him like a fungus, its components indistinguishable in the street-lit dark. Kenneth sits up, slips out of bed, maybe planning to take a Nembutal, maybe just going to have a pee.

But he freezes at the sight on the bedside table: Joe’s open diary and, balanced atop it carelessly, as if flung there by accident, a claw hammer. Joe hung some pictures earlier in the day, so the hammer has every reason to be there. But the juxtaposition of objects hypnotizes Kenneth, draws him.

He extends his hand cautiously, as if he is afraid the hammer will disappear. Then it is in his palm, heavy, smooth wooden handle, a comfortable fit. He raises it.

“Joe?”

Slow breathing.

“Joe?”

I suppose I just wondered whether you were that far gone…

And the knowledge that he is that far gone, that Joe must know that or be blind, sweeps over Kenneth like a dark sea. All the years he has invested, his work, his talent, his whole existence subsumed by Joe. The infidelities lovingly recorded in the diaries, literally under Kenneth’s nose (the flat is only sixteen by eighteen feet). In that moment the dam overflows, the camel’s back breaks, the shit hits the fan, and life as Kenneth Halliwell knows it becomes intolerable.

Without allowing himself to think about it further, he lets the hammer fall.

Nine times.

The amount of blood on his collage is staggering. Even in the dark Kenneth can see that most of the cutout figures are spattered if not obscured entirely. The thing on the pillow is no longer Joe; it is like a physician’s model, an example of a ruined cranium. And yet he still imagines he can hear that slow breathing.

After undressing (Joe’s blood is sticky on his pajama top) and scrawling a brief, unremarkable note, Kenneth goes for the bottle of Nembutal and swallows twenty-two, washing them down with a tin of grapefruit juice. He is dead before his considerable bulk hits the floor.

Joe’s sheets, however, are still warm when the bodies are found the next morning.

London, 8 August 1996

“Harder! It’s not going in! Lean on it… Oh bloody fuck, Willem, get out of the way and let me do it!”

Clive shoulders his way up the narrow staircase and pushes Willem away from one end of a large sofa upholstered in royal purple velvet. The other end of this venerable piece is stuck fast in the doorway of the tiny flat. Clive leans against it and gives a mighty shove. Wiry muscles stand out on his neck and shoulders. Willem mutters something in Dutch.

“What?”

Willem points at a spot just below his navel. “What do you call it when the intestines come out?”

“Hernia? No, look, you push with your knees bent. Like this… Ugh!” The paint on the door frame surrenders several layers, and the sofa is in the flat.

Back outside, they struggle to get an antique steamer trunk full of Clive’s photography equipment up the granite steps of the stoop. The staircase looms above them. Everything seemed much lighter in Amsterdam, probably because they had two friends helping. Now that they are here, their possessions appear enormous and unmanageable.

A young man passing on the street stops to watch their efforts. Clive is annoyed until the man, who is distinctly rough-trade, says, “Need a bit o’ help wi’ that there?”

They accept too gratefully, and he asks for forty pounds. They bargain him down to thirty-five. A bargain it is, for they could not have done it alone. By the time their things are in the flat, they feel sufficiently comfortable with the young man to ask if he knows where to get weed in Islington. The young man exclaims that he lives right around the corner and knows a guy who had some good stuff coming in today. They pay him the thirty-five pounds, give him an additional twenty towards the weed, and say goodbye, half-expecting never to see him again.

Of course, they never do.

“Fucking London,” Clive grumbles over Indian takeaway that night. “Fucking welcome home. Forgot why I left, I did.”

On the verge of thirty, Clive has received glowing reviews for his art photography, but couldn’t get the lucrative portrait work he needed to live well in Amsterdam. He has decided that Dutch people don’t care for having their pictures taken nearly as much as the English do. Even Willem, in all his scruffy blond loveliness, is a lousy model, always fidgeting, wanting a cigarette, wanting a joint, saying he is cold. Willem is a writer (some of the time) and can work anywhere (or not), so they have decided to relocate to Clive’s home city. Willem is excited about the move; he is twenty-five and has never lived outside the Netherlands. Clive hopes it will be temporary.

“We’ll get it somewhere else,” Willem consoles.

“You’re in England now, luvvie dear. You can’t just wander down to the corner coffee shop and ask to see the menu. Anyway, I don’t care about the weed.” Clive makes an expansive gesture ceilingward. “It’s the attitude of this place I loathe.”

“The flat?” Willem looks around in alarm. He selected their new home, and particularly likes the pink and yellow tiles on the ceiling, though he wondered at the wisdom of bringing the purple sofa.

“No, no… London. Filthy place, innit? Always somebody ready to rip you off, from the drug dealer on the street to the poshest restaurant in the city.” He looks up at Willem. “Don’t you think so?”

They have visited London twice in their three years together, and Willem has been coming here on his own since his teens. He loves the grand spaces and vistas, the whirl of traffic, the diversity and dazzle. “No. I find it glamourous.”

Clive smirks. “Wait ’till you’ve lived here a while.”

Willem finishes his rice, sops up the last of the lamb vindaloo with half a chapati, and begins to clear away the containers. “Shall we do some unpacking tonight,” he asks, “or are you too tired?”

“I think I’m too tired for unpacking.”

Willem stops on his way to the kitchenette and looks at Clive. Clive is still smirking, but in a wholly different way.

“Only for unpacking?” Willem inquires.

“Well, the bed’s already unpacked, innit?”

The first sex in a new home is unique, preserved somehow in the watching walls that have already seen so much. It marks the space as your own, and you are conscious of this during the act. It also awakens things in the space that may have lain dormant for years – currents, if you will, or points of energy, or electromagnetic impulses. Or ghosts.

Clive and Willem don’t know anyone has been murdered here. Clive has heard of Joe Orton and his famous death, though he would be hazy on the details if asked. Willem has seen two of Orton’s plays produced in Rotterdam, but knows little of the author’s life in London. He found the plays very clever, had admired their facile wit. Now here he is, all unknowing, sucking his lover’s cock on the spot where that wit met its end.

Admittedly, it is the obvious place for a bed, against one of the longer walls under the big window. Thirty years’ worth of paint, the latest coat a semenesque oyster-white, covers the bloodstains and nightmare collages. Clive lies sprawled on the bed, his back arched, his fingers tangled in Willem’s hair. Willem’s mouth is hot and smooth on his cock, tongue teasing the head, lips slipping down the shaft. The soreness and tension of moving day begin to drain away, and Clive lets himself relax into a stupor of equal parts bliss and exhaustion.

What the FUCK…

This is Joe’s first thought, and he suspects that it is not particularly original. But the feeling is too much to describe: the memory of the hammer blows, the sensation of leaving his body slowly, so slowly, trying to wrench himself free of the mangled meat like an animal chewing off its paw in a trap. Kenneth nearby, but maddeningly cold and dead, having taken the easy way out. Having got the last word. Kenneth was not bound to this place; he could have died anywhere.

After that, nothing. It might have been a second or a century since the first blow fell. There was no heaven, no hell, absolutely nothing at all. Just as Joe had always expected. Until now. Until he finds himself not only sentient, but in the middle of an orgasm.

“Willem!” he hears himself gasping. The name is unknown to him, but the sensations are deliciously familiar.

The young man who has just finished sucking his cock looks up, smiling. His face is square, honest, and beautiful, his eyes china-blue, his full lips still glistening with traces of come.

“Please, will you fuck me now?” he says.

“Well – well, all right.”

“You’re not too tired?” Willem has a charming little accent, German or Dutch; could be Hottentot, for all Joe cares.

“Absolutely not.” As he gets up onto his knees, he takes stock of this blessed body he has found himself in. Its build is much like his own, smallish but solid. It has a big uncircumcised cock already swelling back to half-mast as Willem kisses his mouth, strokes his chest, bites his nipples. It feels young, healthy, glorious.

He turns Willem around and rubs his cock between the younger man’s ass-cheeks. The crack of Willem’s ass is lightly furred with gold. He groans as Willem pushes back against him. Willem passes him a tube of lubricant and a condom. Joe applies the lube to his erect cock and Willem’s pretty ass, gently sliding a finger in, then two. He tosses the condom away, having no idea what else he is supposed to do with it.

Willem feels Clive entering him unsheathed, which is strange but not entirely without precedent; each of them has tested negative three times, and since the third time they’ve gone condomless once or twice. It feels so good that he doesn’t protest now. Clive’s naked cock slides way up inside him, faster and harder than Clive usually puts it in. Clive’s hands are clamped on Willem’s hips, pulling Willem onto him. Clive has always been a wonderful fuck, but Willem cannot remember the last time he felt so thoroughly penetrated.

It seems to go on for hours. Just when he’s sure Clive is going to come, must come, Clive stops and catches his breath and kisses the back of Willem’s neck for a bit, then starts fucking him again. At one point he pulls out, flips Willem over with no apparent effort, pushes Willem’s legs up to his chest, and re-enters him. They settle into a slow, deep rhythm. Clive is nuzzling at Willem’s mouth, not just kissing him but inhaling his breath, sucking hungrily at his lips and tongue. Hungrily. That’s how Clive is making love to him, like a man starved for it.

At last Clive whispers, “I’m going to come now.” His cock seems to go deeper yet, and Willem feels it pulsing inside. Then Clive is holding him ever so tightly, pushing his face into Willem’s neck and (Willem could almost swear) sobbing. His sperm sears Willem’s insides, hot and effervescent, melting into Willem’s tissues and suffusing them with something Willem has never felt before. It is a little like an acid trip, if all the hectic colour and strange splendour of an acid trip could be folded into the space of two sweating, shuddering bodies.

“Thank you,” says Clive, kissing him. Willem sees that Clive is crying, and when he kisses back, the tears taste of salt and copper on his tongue.

Clive knows something happened while Willem was sucking his cock, but he can’t say just what. It was the sex of his life (both his cock and Willem’s ass are satisfyingly sore for days), but there was something detached about it, almost as if he’d been watching himself fuck Willem instead of actually doing it.

Never mind, he tells himself. They were both exhausted from moving; that’s why it was a bit odd. Not bad, though. He wouldn’t actually mind if it happened again.

Within days of their arrival, Clive’s entire Amsterdam portfolio is taken on by a posh London gallery for a handsome commission. He won’t be doing any portrait work for a while. On the way home to give Willem the good news, Clive buys a Polaroid camera.

When he enters the flat, he is surprised to see Willem banging away on his old electric typewriter. As far as Clive knows, Willem hasn’t done a lick of writing since the move. But now a sheaf of pages has accumulated on the desk beside him.

“I wasn’t thinking of anything in particular,” Willem explains, “and then suddenly I had an idea for a play.”

“A play?”

“Yes, I’ve never written one before. Never even liked the idea.” Willem shrugged. “I don’t know what’s got into me, but I hope it stays.”