art brut

I love your body’s sense of being ashlar and marshmallow,

your musclefat, your ripple and your meat;

your tender brawn, the size-up of your squint:

your attitude, your fluency in aggro.

I love the fact your hands can cover mine,

the way you twist my arm behind my back,

the torque with which your muscles wrench my neck;

the way that you, divinely, take your time

before releasing: how your sweat can shine.

I love the way your eyes flash when we fight,

the enormities you whisper in my ear:

dyke, bitch, she-male, faggot, tranny, queer;

the way you bring my vulnerabilities to light,

the capacity your thighs and concrete share,

of standing mute and dramatizing fear.

I love your violent vertu, your brute art:

the way you have me beaten from the start.

Roundabout, roundabout

Usually when my phone flashes it just means one of my girls needs more weed. Usually they’re a little embarrassed, apologetic, so when I get Caz’s message I can tell something’s up:

KIZZ I NEED U HERE QUICK PLZ CUM

I’m meant to be dropping off at Ruby’s place, I’m nearly there, but something about this message seems urgent. I pull into one of the streets by the church.

WHAT’S UP HUN U OK XX

NO TIME PLZ GET HERE HAVE ½ HR MAYBE

WOT U TALKIN BOUT BABE X

I’m already getting ready to drive to Caz’s place. Ruby’s addiction is going to have to wait.

HE HIT ME AGAIN KIZZ IM LEAVIN HIM

‘About fucking time,’ I mutter as I get the car in gear and head off down the High Street. It’s the middle of the day so it isn’t busy; even if it were rush hour the traffic would be mostly the other direction. I go as fast as I legally can, watching out for the cameras – half an hour isn’t a lot of time to get there, but if I get arrested it’s too long.

I speed past Blue House roundabout, the Town Moor, thread the needle through the web of underpasses when you get to town, over the Tyne Bridge, through Gateshead, the Felling bypass, then the road to Washington, roundabouts, roundabouts, roundabouts. Heard from Val that Ruby says this place was built back in the sixties. They had ideas then. No traffic lights was one of them. Roundabouts would keep the cars in order. Pedestrians and cars would never meet. They called it a New Town, though bits of it are old as death.

Roundabout. The big one that crosses the A1 motorway heading to Shields. The sign for that place Terry calls Titty Twisters, the quarry, now a business park. No business though. It’s empty, just about. How we live these days. Little glass and brick deserts, burger vans for the damned. A Little Chef lunch on the Friday. Past the field where they have the Kite Festival.

I met Caz at Pride, couple of years back. The women’s tent, the Drag King Elvis competition, she was laughing but she seemed a little sad. I figured she could use some help. I introduced myself. She looked around and said sorry, I can’t talk. She looked over to the door and I could see him. Looking in, trying to decide what to do, fuming. Is he, I asked her, and she nodded.

Roundabout. One way, the school they turned into a college; the other way to one of the industrial estates, probably a business park too these days. Another big idea: a town made of villages, artificial ones, each one with an industrial estate where the people would work. The idea never did.

I was about to tell her to move out the back, get her away from him, when the bastard comes in. Not all aggro: calm and pleasant. Aye, I know his fucking type. Slimy. Sly. He comes up and says hi. His name is Malcolm, but everybody calls him fucking Mally. Aye, I think, I bet they fucking do. He turns to Caz, says aren’t you going to introduce me to your friend?

Roundabout, overpass, roundabout. The big one, passing under the Highway. Turn off here and reach the A19, Middlesbrough, York if you carry on long enough. I’m going straight. Past trees planted to baffle the sounds of the traffic, seeing the Monument for the first time, a black version of those temples down in Greece. That thing gives me the creeps. It was built by some rich bloke, owned all of the mines. And they say you could see it from all of the mines. Fucking creepy weirdo.

Caz is gaping like a trout here because she doesn’t know my name, is worried this Malcolm will think she’s coming on to me, I’m coming on to her, I can see this ending badly, so I make the only move I can. Look, I say, just tell me if I’m being out of order but it’s a hot day and somethin’ about your missus suggested to me she might need something to chill her out, that’s all. I open my jacket, pull out some tinfoil, a ten-spot of green.

You could get in trouble for that, he says.

Roundabout. One way to the Village, one way loops back to the Highway. The joke is nobody can find their way in Washington because the roundabout signs all just say the District Numbers for each Village, which no-one outside of town knows, but no-one who lives here knows either, because they just use the names. This joke is over ten years out of date but they still make it. People like to laugh at ideas from the 60s. ‘Cause we’re so much better. So more modern. With our empty business parks.

I look him in the eye. Probably, I say, but you’ll pay a better price for my stuff than the booze they rip you off for here. He smiles. But if you don’t want any...

Mally? She asks, making puppy dog eyes at him, can I have some, and I watch the smile insinuate its way onto his face. I can see he’s about to ask how much, know he’ll use this as an excuse to barter down, so I change the game. Here, have it, I say, putting the wrap in his hand, pulling a pen from my pocket as quick as I can, sleight of hand, and he fumbles to hide it from view. They always do.

Roundabout. A smaller one, either way leads to old houses. Then the smallest yet, only two exits, the one to the left which leads to the river, the one straight ahead, where I’m going.

And if you need more and I grab hold of her hand, write my number, if you ever need anything and I look her in the eyes when I say anything. He gets the stuff into the pocket of his jeans, well nice to meet you and they’re off. I leave the site by the back entrance, get out of the park quick as I can, lucky I didn’t bring the car, walk zigzag and chaotic through the park, across the road, down to West Jesmond where I take the Metro home.

Roundabout: here. This is the place where I’m turning.

I knew that it’d be him who would text, him who’d come out to pick stuff up from me, but I’d know where they lived. Over time I relaxed him, he’d let her come out, always there, always watching, but she would emerge.

I park outside her house, keep the car running, text her HERE X and she runs out, in a hoodie and trackers, carrying a single holdall. No black eye, no sign of grab marks on her wrist. I know better than to start by asking questions. We drive off.

‘I thought you said he hit ya?’ I have to ask.

‘He’s been hittin us,’ she tells me. ‘But he isn’t like the others, he doesn’t storm off after that. This is my chance Kizz, my window. But if I told you that I didn’t know you’d come.’

‘Jesus babe, you didn’t have to say he’d hit you, y’know – ’

‘I know. Kizz, thanks for coming and I know I was probably being stupid but I had to get you here. I’m glad you are.’ She reaches for my knee.

‘You don’t have to do that to show me you’re grateful,’ I tell her. ‘I’m not fucking him.’ My hands are tight, white-knuckle, gripping the steering wheel. That fucking shitehawk.

Things go quiet for a while. Roundabout, roundabout.

‘So how’d you have a window?’ I ask her.

She smiles. ‘I shopped him to his work.’

‘You what?’

‘Relax, he doesn’t know it’s me. The stupid bastard leaves his Facebook open all the time. I took shots of his posts, in the Infidels group and the EDL pages, all that. I sent an email from the college, on a break from my employability course.’ She smiles. ‘First time that’s ever come in useful.’

‘Jesus, Caz.’

She looks over at me again, and her smile’s going manic. ‘He fucking phones me from work. Hey doll I’m gonna be late,’ she says, miming a phone by her ear. ‘Work found out about my posts and they’ve only called the fuckin’ bizzies.’ She laughs. ‘The fucking police!’

‘Aye well I’m not surprised babe. Some of that stuff that he writes is fucking vile.’ I follow him on Facebook, though he doesn’t know it’s me. I keep an eye.

Truth is, I wish I’d thought of doing this. ‘Did you expect the police to come?’

She shakes her head. ‘I thought he’d get in trouble, they’d maybe keep him back or something, suspend him.’

‘Wouldn’t that mean he’d be around more?’

‘He would at first but I know what he’s like. He’d stew for a week, then start hitting up pubs with the rest of those cunts. I’ve been planning. I knew I’d have a chance to leave sometime. I just didn’t think it’d be today.’

She unzips the bag she’s carrying and shows me what’s inside. Some pants and tampons. An old Nokia. And money.

‘I saved and I saved. I bought this with cash, pay as you go. It’s a burner. I smashed up my old phone just after I texted you, threw the SIM card down the drain. And the rest is for expenses. Some’s for you.’

‘Ah now, bollocks – ’

‘No, I need somewhere to stay and I want to crash at yours, at least for the first couple of days. I can pay you back…’

I shake my head. ‘Keep your money for someone you have to pay. You can crash at mine regardless. I’m just glad you’re safe.’

She looks out the window. ‘Well I’m not safe, not quite, not yet. But I tell you what,’ she looks at me. ‘I’m going to be.’

Roundabout, roundabout.

Incident by the Six Benches

This summer is ridiculous. This year. I can’t sleep. Again. At Valerie’s, on her goddam leather sofa which sticks to my back and my butt and literally fucking sucks. It isn’t her fault and in winter it’s fine but in this heat it’s just intolerable. Take your clothes off to cool down and you stick to the furniture. Put clothes on to stop yourself sticking, sweat your ass off all the more. An unwinnable battle. A double-bind.

Only way out of a double-bind is to say fuck it, so I pull on my clothes, check my make-up. It isn’t on point – whose is, at 4am? – but all it needs is a touch more mascara, a top-up of the brows, and fresh lipstick…after a drag on the pipe, of course. I don’t want to stain it.

The smart thing to do is head home. But I’m bored with that walk, by the cemetery, over the bridge with its cold war suggestions, down to the flats. I feel like taking a different route.

Out to the Co-Op? It’s risky. The shop won’t be open at this hour -though nowhere else will, save the garages – and that way you’re headed to Kenton. Rough country. I don’t know the local patterns. Here, nobody’s out at 4am, except the early shift workers and the truly masochistic joggers. Up Wansbeck Road way might be different. But even when I lived in Scotswood this was quiet time. And I’d get to see St Hugh’s, and the No Golfing sign, and those beautiful flats with the weird orange detailing.

I leave the house and take a rightward turn. A straight shoot from here and sooner or later you’re not in Newcastle no more: and the border starts early. Walking to Valerie’s on Ladies’ Day, scanning the crowd at the Three Mile Inn, the grain of roadside concrete, thinking this is where Northumberland begins. The girl I once got off with, who lived in filth and kept a copy of the Bristol Stool Chart on her wall, who told me her family were Border Country royalty. Her father announced he was gay, and started looking for love in the Telegraph personals. Her disgust: ‘everybody knows you use the Guardian for that’. How the other half cruises.

Catch a bus here and you can make for Morpeth, Alnwick, via Acklington Prison where the mood on the bus really changes depending on what side of visiting you’re riding. A girl I know is in there, detransitioned for her safety. I’d visit, but I only knew her vaguely and I think maybe getting visits from a tranny would be bad for her in-prison rep.

Maybe I’m a bad person.

I’m not going straight today. At the roundabout I turn left, past the postwar houses with their porticos, the nautical curves in their window bays, the new(ish) build flats on the right. This is not a long walk but, being mostly tout droit, it seems longer.

It reminds me of Nunhead station, part of this walk. The part by Wansbeck Road. Passing under the bridge. Meeting Leon there, and Billy Monster. The walk past the pub, over Telegraph Hill. Up Kitto Road and round the corner to the Big Queer House, where we drank and smoked until God knows what hour in the garden. This is the London I miss: not the tourist areas but the places people live. The bust of Olaudah Equiano in the park. The house off Pepys Road with books stacked to the top of the window, spines facing in, skyscrapers of paper. You could see Canary Wharf’s pyramid, light flashing, if you leaned out of Leon’s attic skylight.

The sign says NO GOLFING. Valerie and I both took photos. She wants to come back, borrow a golf glove from someone – or maybe just buy one, there’s a golf shop up the road, under the Indian restaurant whose curry Brianna finds too sweet – and take a photo of a hand wearing it, flipping off the sign. Golf or die, man!

It feels rural to me, this path by the Rugby Club. Nothing but fields in one direction. Val disagrees. Kansas City rural’s on a bigger scale than ours. She describes it as suburban but it’s more than that, out here. Rothbury Avenue, moving to Regent’s Farm Road: that’s suburban. This place…that field could keep going. All the way to the border. Like Christina’s World.

In the Co-Op up the road, they display the Scottish Sunday Post as prominently as the Newcastle Evening Chronicle. They know that we’re in the borderlands, even if the maps pretend they’re far away. ‘Every time something happens there are all these cries to move the border.’ A liminal place. Something could happen.

It’s a liminal time, too. There is no such thing as dawn. There are two kinds of twilight, morning and evening, and three types in each: civil. Nautical. And astronomical. BMNT: begin morning nautical twilight. Military coinages. Fortified language. A killing ground between the night and day.

That French film that Valerie raves about, the Queens of Night and Day. This is a film about magick, she says to me, and I hear her sounding the k. Valerie’s occult enthusiasms, witchcraft as a way out of the white girl trap of cultural embezzlement. I gave her a copy of Hutton, told her that stuff’s all made up. I suspect she won’t read it.

That film is pretty damn good though.

I walk past the topiarised hedges, three houses in a row with greenery so straight you could rule margins with it. I don’t know why just these three houses: I would like to think they’re council in a sea of right-to-buy, that Nick Forbes is sending a man out to shear these things straight, but realistically that isn’t very likely. The new opening times for the Library, an A4 sheet stuck to the back of the door. On Tuesdays and Thursdays the Team Mystic kids who have the place held down must wait outside to troll the gym. Or hit the Quaker Meeting House instead.

What’s more likely is one of the people here just likes his hedge straight, and does his neighbours’ so it isn’t out of place. The Big Society extends as far as next door’s garden. And no golfing.

I come to my favourite bit of the walk: the Six Benches. Municipal, black iron and wood, left right left, a De Chirico promenade, empty each time I’ve seen them. An invitation to musical chairs.

I’ve photographed them once already, put the shots through Pixlr and Prisma, all possible filters, but haven’t quite got it. There’s an angle that I haven’t shot from yet. I have to find it. Magic hour’s coming. If I work, then I can make this really good.

I stand at a distance, walk closer, step back. I hold my cracked phone on its side, hold it up, try Dutch angles. I walk behind the benches, meet them from the other side, I cross the road and shoot from there. I kneel on one knee until it aches, then on the other. It’s taking a while but I feel like I’ve got it.

‘Here!’

Damn. Got so caught up taking the shot I stopped paying attention. Where the Hell is hypervigilance when I actually need it?’

‘Here! Yee!’

Still kneeling, flicking the camera to video in case I need evidence, I look up.

‘I knaa yee!’

By the benches

in the morning’s civil twilight

I see her again

Civil Twilight

By the benches
In the morning's civil twilight
I see her again

Badge of Honour

‘Wait,’ I ask her, ‘this is with women? Cis women?’

She shakes her head. ‘Rarely. Usually it’s crossdressers, drag people, guys with a fetish for spandex and fishnets.’

‘Right.’

‘I mean a couple of cis women, but sort of as favours? There was a dominatrix I knew and…’

‘What was that like?’

‘Pretty good, but she was going for pins, not submissions. She facesat me in a weird way though.’

‘Weird how?’

‘Face down. I had her big thighs either side of my head and my nose and mouth shoved up against this dusty dungeon floor.’

‘Ugh.’

‘It was great. I loved it.’

‘Jesus, Ruby.’

She holds her lighter to the bowl of her pipe and inhales, then passes it to me. Under the first of the ash the powdered buds glow like coal.

‘And Rachel.’

‘Bloody Hell! Wasn’t that when - ?’

‘I was presenting as male then, yeah. She’d dress me in her clothes and make my face up, then kick my ass.’

I raise an eyebrow. ‘Really?’

‘Yeah yeah I know, file under obvious clues.’

I pass the pipe back to her. This is a weird conversation.

‘How did that come about?’

‘I came out to her. About liking…this.’ She gestures to the floor around us, Valerie’s mattress, our clothes scattered over the floor, ripped tights and stretched knickers. Her belly still red where I punched it, her breasts still showing the marks from my fingers.

‘And she was okay with it?’

‘Hmmm. She didn’t take much convincing. It’s a seductive thing, to be told you’re admired for your strength.’

‘You cower before them so invitingly.’

‘Huh?’

‘Nothing. Song lyric. So why on Earth did you and Rachel split up then? I mean if she was willing to indulge your wrestling fetish…’

‘Well, that didn’t last the whole of the marriage.’

‘Why?’

‘Because, dear Emma, if you had ever been in a long-term monogamous relationship instead of standing at the still point of a polyamorous tornado, you’d know that the sexual side of it becomes less…prominent after a while?’

‘Ah. Lesbian bed death.’

‘I guess so, in a way. And also, um, I knocked her out.’

‘Holy SHIT Ruby! How the fuck – ’

‘It was an accident, okay? She was on top of me, I pushed her back – I mean I was struggling but not really struggling, you know? I was enjoying being held down, anyway, I pushed her back a little but I hadn’t clocked the table was above us and…she hit it. Spark out. I had to move to the side to avoid being trapped underneath her.’

‘Jesus!’

‘I was shitting myself. I thought I’d fucking killed her. I was doing the whole movie thing, oh fuck, trying to remember how to do CBT…’

‘How would that help?’

She nods her head from side to side, retracing her steps. ‘CPR. Don’t you die on me, all that…’

‘Did you actually say don’t you die on me?’

‘Just about. Anyway, she wasn’t out long. I don’t know if you’ve ever been knocked out before…’

‘I have not, thankfully.’

‘I haven’t either. I’d really like to be knocked out some day though, that’d be awesome.’

‘You are a very special person.’

‘Ha ha. Anyway, being knocked out does not actually last that long. It’s a few seconds, a minute, not huge amounts of time. She came round pretty quickly.’

‘How did she feel about that?’

‘I think she felt kind of excited about it, actually. She wanted to go again.’

‘Did you?’

She looks at me like I’ve asked her to buttfuck the Pope in full Rangers kit. ‘No! For all I knew she might have had concussion. I told her that was enough for the night and we stopped. And we didn’t do it again, actually.’

‘You were worried you’d hurt her?’

‘Yeah. People don’t realise how dangerous the average living room is as a fighting environment. I mean even here you have to watch out for the desk and the radiator, the shelves at the end, but there isn’t a coffee table. The coffee table is the first thing you get rid of, if you’re going to do this stuff.’

‘Duly noted. So how were things afterwards?’

‘Like I say, she seemed kind of excited. It was a story she’d return to sometimes. Remember that time you knocked me out? It was like a badge of honour, a memory of adventure, taking risks. Like my mum telling the story about my uncle nearly killing her with an axe.’

‘Christ, Ruby, what the fuck is your family?’

‘It’s not actually as crazy as it sounds. I just mean that…I think women don’t get sanction as adventurers, you know? It’s getting better, but especially in the past…I just…I don’t know. She had a quiet life. She was a teacher! She didn’t have many memories of her body being strong, of snapping back, of being tough. Sometimes I think I took that away from her, because I was frightened.’

‘Hmmm. Ruby Ross, you are one weird fucking lady.’

‘Look who’s talking.’

I flip her off and roll up on my knees. ‘Wanna go again?’

She smiles. 

between

Ruby's Game

Here is what you do: you make someone’s acquaintance. Exchange pictures. Discuss what you would like to do. Eventually, if you feel safe enough doing so, you meet. It isn’t so very different from the usual forms of dating these days, except we don’t meet up to kiss and cuddle, but to slap and scratch and bite. We meet to fight.

On Fetlife, which is as close to mainstream as BDSM gets, the term ‘struggle play’ is sometimes used to lend a sense of respectability and separate what I do from competitive fighting. I can see why. There is something tacky about it. Something a little bit redneck, a bit working class. Punishing someone with your own body is churlish. A true gentleman has tools for such specialist work.

And a true lady?

There’s something particularly declassé about women fighting each other. Scrapping isn’t ladylike. Even those who service the fetish connive in the perception: I once saw a video described as ‘the kind of action you might see outside a rough pub on a Saturday night’. Now, my experience of rough pubs is limited, but as I recall they don’t provide rubber mats for aggressive patrons to fight on, even on weekends. Maybe they should.

Yes, I watch this stuff: other women fighting, their bodies colliding in private rooms, in public bars, in rings and pools and cages. And before the Web, before I was able to watch it, I would scan the grainy adverts in the Apter mags, pick up copies of Catspats from the American Magazine Centre on Collingwood street, a haven for hard-copy specialist porn, long since transformed into a lifestyle venue which advertises itself with a giant Buddhist head in the window and the words Hidden bar and secret lounge etched into the glass. An open kind of secret, like the link between violence and sex.

The first person I ever wrestled was…probably my father or one of my brothers. Being raised as a boy gives many opportunities for rough-housing. I sometimes wonder how I would have been different had I been raised as a girl.

One of my earliest memories of school is being beaten up by a gang of girls for some reason or other, some infraction of the playground code, some rule no-one had thought to let me in on. Pointy-toed shoes were the fashion for rough girls in Jarrow in those days, and I remember how painful it was to have those sharp tips digging into my chest and my abdomen as I lay on the ground. A teacher had to intervene to stop them kicking me. Unchecked, I really believe they might well have kicked me to death. I learned at a very early age that girls can be as violent as boys. It’s something I’ve never stopped learning.

I do not consider myself a subscriber to the school of thought which locates sexual fetishism in early traumatic experiences. According to this school, my liking of female violence is a kind of Stockholm syndrome, a pact made at an unconscious level to recuperate the trauma of remembering. I do not refuse to subscribe to this school because I fear it, but because I find it all too simple, too much of a Freudian gotcha! That it is probably partially true on some level I don’t doubt, but where the psyche is concerned nothing is ever simply causal. Reckoning with the unconscious is like wrestling in oil (I have never wrestled in oil, though I would like to).

Reducing this to a trauma-response makes it seem sad and abject, and in fact over the years fighting, being beaten up, choked out, made to give in, has been a source of joy. Feeling helpless excites me, and when I see other women feeling the same way, and the women who make them feel that way, I feel a rush of carnal recognition. I don’t identify, have never identified, with the dominant one in these encounters, but the woman who is dominated, who struggles. I want to fight, and to lose, and to lose badly, at the hands of another woman. And one of the things I want out of transition is to have a body that experiences pain the way cis women’s bodies do, so I can feel that loss fully. I want breasts that hurt like a bitch when someone mauls them; I want a cunt so you can punch me in it.