Free Friction by Joe Stretch Page A

watch. Diamonds. What is time doing?
    â€˜Carly’s fine,’ says Steve. ‘I’m fine. Look at me.’
    â€˜You’re a beautiful young man, Steve, a beautiful young man.’
    â€˜I know I am.’
    â€˜Of course you do. Of course you do.’
    Frank begins to bang on about something, prostitutes, perhaps, they’re constantly frustrating him, but Steve decides to not listen. His relationship with Frank is far from comfortable. Where are the tweeded economists of my youth? he thinks. Where is my respected brain? The lever-arch files, tutorials, ambition, the cups of tea and talk of Keynes. Steve feels his mobile phone vibrate in his jacket pocket, buzzing next to his heart. A text. It’s Carly, no doubt, but he doesn’t look. He feigns interest as Frank talks him through the economic future of mechanical sex. He is, he realises, surrounded by choice. Coated in the stuff, his palms sticky with it. Choice. The fat twat Frank who cares for cash and painfully thin prostitutes with siliconed titslike overkicked footballs. The fit-as-fuck Carly who cares for cash, boob tubes, alcohol, whatever. So much choice. It’s hilarious. Is it possible I’ve made so many choices?
    After declining Frank’s invitation to go to one of Didsbury’s five-star massage parlours, Steve returns to his car and checks his phone.
    Sorry babe. should
    have asked. soz, really soz.
    in town with Girl 1 x x
    Anal then, logically. Because I am still a penetrator, thinks Steve, twisting the key in the ignition. And because you die. Because I’m beautiful and I’m young.

11
The Satsuma
    AFTER ABANDONING JOHNNY in the park and talking Dostoevsky at the university, Rebecca is late for work. The sun has dropped below the Town Hall, casting a shadow on to Deansgate. The last of the shoppers beat hasty retreats. They make for car parks, dragging bags and children, aware that night is falling and that they risk being out when the party starts. They feel the beat of the boozers drumming beneath their feet. And they run.
    But, yes, Rebecca. She works in a strip club on Deansgate. She’s an unlikely stripper, really, what with her occasional moral outbursts. But on arriving in Manchester she was keen to become one. Because as much as she resents the cobwebbed corners of the male mind, she cannot help but investigate them. Tonight she’s late for her shift. It’s almost seven by the time she passes through the scarlet curtains and walks down the steps into the Nude Factory.
    In truth, Rebecca had been lucky to get a job as a stripper. Her breasts don’t droop, but nor could they have your eye out. When she came for the interview she knew she wasborderline. She had shivered topless in the centre of a back room as men tapped their lower lips, sending clouds of grey smoke towards her. ‘She’s girl next door,’ the manager, Marcus, had said at last. ‘And we need a real pair.’ She got the job. She had smiled and got dressed. As she left the interview she heard a bouncer whispering to himself. ‘Wicked nipples,’ he had said.
    In the Nude Factory the light is purple and cheap. The air is smoky and greased. Rebecca smiles at the manager, at Marcus, the fat black man who sits at the bar in a cloud of smoke, bomber jackets and men. Marcus is medically incapable of smiling.
    â€˜You’re late,’ he shouts, his voice like a desperate engine.
    â€˜I know,’ she calls, ‘traffic was a nightmare.’
    Rebecca makes straight for the changing room. She enjoys being the girl next door. She enjoys the job in general. The money is amazing and the other girls are good company. Invariably, she arrives to find a streaked-orange stripper hunched tearfully over her huge tits, weeping about a man whose name sounds like it ought to belong to a pair of trainers. Yes, she enjoys them, the other girls. Those that aren’t students are simply fascinating tragedies,