Free Ménage by Ewan Morrison Page A

embarrassment. She would pee with the door open, and read his books legs tucked to her knees on his sofa, with no panties on, giving us ample display of her peach-like buttocks and pouting pussy. She said coming off the antidepressants made her feel herself again. Saul thought it at times hilarious – a habit of the decadent aristocracy, the aristocracy always parade around half naked, he said. — My God, the Duchess is alive and living in my living room!
    You may not believe what follows but it is as factually true as that old cliché that declares joy harder to depict than conflict. All of our great narratives are of conflict and so joy goes undocumented and it is said that by documenting joy, we diminish and destroy it, but we found the opposite to be true. Our happiness was absolutely a product of her omnipresent camera. She would point it at me in the midst of – what? – sorting out my socks, and say: Action! And suddenly this banal chore turned into a performance. I would pull them on slowly as if I were Marlene Dietrich with silk stockings.
    We said ‘cut’ a lot. It became our way of saying: this is boring, let’s do something else. Saul no longer moaned or bitched at me, because he did not want to be caught in such a mood on camera. He woke and dressed before I even rose, as if ready for his close-up, Mr de Mille. Dot bought a hundred pounds’ worth of blank videotapes, and we got through half of them in a week. It even changed the world around us – one day we walked down Old Street arm in arm, all three, and because she held her camera at arm’s length filming us no one who passed said a thing. Some scary proles even jumped in our way, all smiles and waved to the lens, asking: — This for da telly, darlin?
    Our shadows reached long into the streets on those October evenings as we searched for things to film. We always ended up kicking about in the warehouse, off Old Street, the door long since booted in, brainstorming. Dot suggested we run around naked. — Cut! Saul shouted. — Too performance art. The whole nudity-as-truth thing is a modernist fallacy.
    I proposed that we could dance around to music. — Cut! he called out. — It’s been done before by that annoying socialist artist girl who danced in a shopping mall in Peckham, and besides, all the first MTV pop videos had pop bands dancing about in abandoned warehouses.
    No matter what ideas Dot and I came up with he found reasons to abandon them. — Cut! It’s no use. Stop trying to be interesting, he insisted. — You cannot compete with advertising. The only way to strike profundity is to aim one’s sights at the utterly banal and to miss completely.
    When he said things like that Dot shouted, — Stop, I have to record this. But by the time she got her camera ready he’d lost momentum and couldn’t pick up the thread again. Everything had been done before, he said, even the saying of it had been said before.
    I started to sense we’d get nothing done and that we were damaging her chance of an art degree. She had yet to learn that Saul’s encyclopaedic knowledge could be crippling. If it were not so then he would not still be have been with two wannabes, at age – what? – twenty-nine, thirty, hanging out in disused warehouses. The only way to be a true nihilist without being a hypocrite was to do absolutely nothing, he had often said. But when the camera was turned off we felt rather empty, melancholy.
    As per a typical night I shoplifted Pot Noodles on the way home and we added ketchup and chilli pepper to make up for the lack of sustenance by way of stimulation, then degreasing it all with boxes of sherry.
    — Oh ‘O’, she said to me, — I’ll never make art at this rate, I’m rubbish.
    Saul, suitably loosened, declared the answer was not to think of something arty to film, but to live more dangerously. He started on one of his rants about the Duchess.
    — She could not be contained, restrained. Her blood itself was in