The Wigan Orgy
It was a shame not to depart from a more romantic station, the graceful curve of Waterloo, the great glass vaults of King’s Cross and Paddington, the black-and-white matinée of Marylebone. But travel to the north-west meant the doomy black box of Euston, a building whose exterior is somehow disguised – no lifelong Londoner can draw a picture of it – as is its function, the trains departing furtively from a back room. Even on a bright, crisp April morning, it felt gloomy and dystopian, her fancy-dress costume now absurd, the sports bra a tourniquet, the thermals deployed far too soon, forty litres of clothing tugging at her back so that she thought she might pass out in the queue for coffee, roll backwards on to her pack, arms and legs waving uselessly, a beetle in a shoebox.
She felt better on the train, the first of the day, claiming her forward-facing window-seat with table: the dream. Now she was an executive, laying out her laptop, pen and notepad, charging her devices unnecessarily, because this was the key to surviving in the wild, charging devices and using a toilet whenever the chance arose. She laid out her ancient copy of Wuthering Heights, which she’d brought to get in the mood, and now the train crawled out into the light, emerging behind the terraces of Mornington Crescent, an address that still retained an atmosphere of old kitchen-sink films, sad, shabby love stories, the kind she’d aspired to when she’d first moved to the city. She saw closed shutters and grimy curtains, imagined new lovers slumbering in rented rooms. Then, above the terraces, came a knife of brilliant blue and she felt sorry for anyone who was still in bed.
City faded into suburb. She saw gasometers, horses in a stable-yard, dog-walkers on a frosty recreation ground, articulated lorries on the ring roads, everyone going about their business, as in a Richard Scarry book. She’d become so used to the view from her kitchen table, the short lens of London life. Now England was a model village blown up to life-size. Look, canal boats! A recycling plant! A wind-farm! Infrastructure, was that the word? The suburbs faded and stagey swirls of mist lingered in the dips and hollows. Wild cows! She was observing the hell out of things, remembering the power of a train journey to turn life into montage, a sequence conveying change. Why hadn’t she done this before? What had she been so scared of? Would she care for anything on the trolley? She would care for everything.
She’d agreed to come along for three nights, the first leg of the Coast to Coast, which was apparently some big deal. It seemed feeble just to be doing the one coast but even if she hated it, if they didn’t get on or ran out of things to say, surely she could survive for three nights. She’d see the Atlantic and some of those famous Lakes, then sprint back from Penrith on Tuesday, and in the afternoons, she would find a quiet spot and work, because all of this adventure would need to be paid for.
She opened up the new assignment. Twisted Night was the sequel to the highly successful erotic thriller Dark Night, which took the lid off the glamorous, shocking world of Hollywood’s private sex clubs. ‘Very spicy,’ said the editor, ‘but possibly written a little too quickly.’ Even the title seemed to demand a margin note, because a night might be hard or hot or endless but in what sense could it be twisted?
She soon found out. The opening orgy alone took her through the Cotswolds to the West Midlands and Marnie had never felt more grateful for the empty seat beside her. So disorienting was the action that she had to make notes on her napkin to establish everyone’s whereabouts, a complex web of arrows and initials, like a diagram of the Battle of Austerlitz. Was S on top of B now or behind and, if so, where did that put L and what was in her hand? A vibrator hopped from left to right to left, like a nightclub singer’s microphone, and the author alternated ‘PVC’ and ‘latex’ as if they were synonyms. Marnie was pretty sure they were not, though when she searched on the train’s Wi-Fi she was told that latex PVC was a forbidden term.
She deleted her search history and would fact-check later. In the meantime there was plenty to be getting on with, not least the wild punctuation, the commas scattered like rose petals, the yelp of exclamation marks, paragraph-length sentences that gave the text a kind of hallucinatory, high-modernist intensity. Marnie had not attended an orgy, though she had copy-edited many, and while this was not the same thing, she couldn’t deny the author’s skill in conveying a sense of disorientation and sex-panic, so that you really couldn’t tell who was doing what to who, or ‘to whom’, or ‘to who what was being done by whom’. An orgy was like trying to pat your head and rub your stomach at the same time, except the head and stomach belonged to other people and it wasn’t their head and stomach. Was it S’s hot tongue on L’s salty skin or B’s sharp nipple in L’s soft mouth, and was ‘sharp’ really the right word?
As a civilian reader she might, she supposed, be turned on by all this, sleazy and facile though it was, but a certain professional distance was required and so she worked on methodically, wondering if anyone’s sex really did taste of the ocean and, if so, was this a good thing? Maybe it was a question of which ocean. No one wanted to taste of the English Channel.
Marnie sipped her tea. She had not shared a bed with anyone for – oh, God, terrible arithmetic – six years now. She knew that this was not unusual and that celibacy was a perfectly acceptable choice, but when she’d tested the statistic on Cleo, she’d simply said, ‘Yikes.’ Her friend had always carried an aura of sexual confidence, a kind of heavy-lidded, tousled air, never boasting exactly but hinting at her satisfaction in ‘that department’. Marnie had tried not to resent this but that ‘Yikes’ had stung. It’s like driving on a motorway, she’d told Marnie. You can’t avoid it for too long or it becomes frightening, and Marnie had felt another little twist of resentment because she’d always liked driving on the motorway, had been complimented on her driving, would like to drive on the motorway again. Even marriage had not cured her of that.
But it seemed unlikely on this holiday. Whether it was the fresh air or the paraphernalia of wipe-clean trousers and cling-filmed cheese rolls, there was something powerfully anti-aphrodisiac about the English countryside. The smell of wet wool and an unwashed Thermos flask, the taste of boiled sweets … no, sex belonged in cities. In Los Angeles, for instance, they’d been at it for three hundred miles now and she longed for someone, anyone, to orgasm so that she could look out of the window. But on it went, page after page, through Warrington, Wigan and Preston. She had a headache. Would someone please just fake it? By Lancaster, the words were beginning to lose their meaning. At Oxenholme, she typed the note ‘close repetition of “cock”’, saved the file, then looked up.
It seemed they’d crossed the border into another country, all purple and sage green, and off to the left she could see – this was not the right word – lumps, less than a mountain, more than a hill, each rising abruptly, like a child’s drawing of a volcano. Somewhere beyond those hills was the Irish Sea, which meant she’d have to traverse this landscape to catch her train back. She reached for her books, A Pictorial Guide to the Western Fells and The Central Fells by Alfred Wainwright, facsimiles of the old editions, the text hand-written, the prose fine and sturdy as a dry-stone wall, the illustrations densely cross-hatched, lovely but as gloomy as a walking map of Mordor. She laughed at the notion that these might ever help her find her way. Opening a page at random she began to read but the Hollywood orgy lingered.
She gave up on Alfred Wainwright. Silly to lug them around, a rural prop of no more practical use to her than the briar pipe the author chewed in his photo. She looked back to the window, hoping to spot a lake through the trees in the same way you might spot a giraffe on safari, suppressing a sacrilegious thought that, while the view was lovely, she’d got the idea. Penrith shortly, then Carlisle, where she was due to change trains then curl back south along the Cumbrian coast. The dawn start was catching up with her. She closed her eyes and dreamt of clear forest streams, lofty parapets of granite, red squirrels in their high heels with their hot, soft mouths.