Eat to the Beat

Oh, you got a sweet tooth and I remember
Standing on the corner with a piece of pizza
Eat to the beat...

"I think this song's about wanking."

Kirsty looked up at me with a naughty glint in her eyes. She grinned and then returned her attention to the record sleeve in her hand. She was sitting on her bedroom floor, liquorice legs splayed, carelessly revealing the gusset of her black woolly tights. Around her were scattered her favourite albums, original Beatles, Hendrix and Bowie, mostly stolen from her dad. She had been telling me how Blondie saved her life as an unusual and awkward eleven year old, by giving her a glimpse of an alternative reality; where it was cool to be different.

"My dad was the first person I knew who had a video - none of my mates had one. I used to spend all weekend watching Eat to the Beat and Breaking Glass: over and over again."

I let her ramble on, only half listening. Young art college girls are always talking about themselves. Kirsty's all right though: she's funny and pretty much game for anything in bed. She nodded her head in time to the beat, tapping out the rhythm on her thigh with her spare hand.

The backless dress she was wearing revealed the oxtail bumps of her spine, her shoulder blades sticking up like chicken wings as she bent from the waist to retrieve another record sleeve. She's so thin, she looks like one of the Egon Schiele drawings she so admires, postcards of which share wall space with her own charcoal sketches: self-portraits, mostly nudes, depicting her skinny anorexic body with small pointy breasts. Just a discreet smudge where her muff should be: I know what it looks like in the flesh though. It makes me hard thinking about it.

"Come over here Chicken Bones," I say, beckoning her to the empty space next to me on the bed.

.........................................

I lay in bed thinking about Dave. I hadn't slept very well: I never do. I don't have much padding and my hip bones jut out too much to lie comfortably. I ran my fingers over the bumps of my rib cage, over the concave bowl of my stomach and let them rest between my legs. Sex - that's all I think about since meeting Dave. It makes a change, usually it is food I'm preoccupied with: how to avoid eating it and how to hide my self-starvation from everyone else.

I met Dave in the canteen at college. He was on his break and he sat down opposite me, he watched me intently as I ate my apple, making it last as long as possible. He's a catering lecturer: I usually go for arty blokes, but Dave isn't just a cook, he's very creative. He presents his dishes like tiny sculptures on the plate. The meals he makes me have inspired my latest art project: a dinner for two made from objets trouvés.

I brought out my fingers from under the duvet and sniffed them. They were sticky and smelled of chocolate. I remembered why. Dave visited last night, bringing goodies he'd stolen from work. They'd been catering for a conference and he said it would just go to waste if we didn't eat it. I offered to fetch bowls and cutlery from the kitchen downstairs, but he looked me up and down and said:

"No need, you'll do."

We stripped naked and Dave told me to lie down on the bed. He brought out a plastic box from his rucksack and then started to arrange the delicate puffs of choux pastry on the inward curve of the platter of my belly. He trickled cold chocolate syrup over the pyramid of cream-filled delicacies and down between the hollow of my thighs, making me wince and giggle. I found the experience more uncomfortable than erotic, but Dave was obviously very excited by it.

He selected one of the profiteroles from the pile and popped it into his mouth, chewing slowly, and then he fed one to me. He repeated this game until they were all gone and all that was left was a gooey puddle of chocolate sauce. Dave settled himself between my legs and set to work licking the remnants of our feast from my body. The warmth of his tongue and his enthusiastic slurping brought the experience to life and I started to enjoy it too. He looked me in the eye and then lifted my legs over his back, his shoulders in the crooks of my knees. Grabbing my buttocks he lifted the bowl of my pelvis right off the bed and up to his face, gorging himself on me. I gasped with surprise, but it soon turned to pleasure as he swirled his tongue inside me. That's how I eat the filling from a creme egg, as though every last trace of nectar sweetness has to be captured by my probing tongue. I love creme eggs.

................................................

"Crumpet."
"Beef curtains."
"Fanny batter!"

We drove to Kirsty's end of term show in the little Bedford Rascal I use for my catering business. Kirsty laughed gleefully, it was her idea to play this silly game: she could probably tell that I was tense. She knows I'm not very keen on her art college friends - they make me want to be really obnoxious.

Kirsty was swigging Diamond White from the bottle, her feet up on the dashboard.

"You shouldn't be drinking that on an empty stomach."

"It's just to calm my nerves. Anyway, how do you know my stomach's empty?"

"Because you're so thin, that if you ate something, I'd be able to the outline of it - like a python digesting an antelope."

I tried to make a joke of it. She's really sensitive about her weight and keeps accusing me of trying to feed her up. I changed the subject quickly with a flash of brilliance:

"Pork sword!" I shouted, as we stopped at a traffic light, "I win. By the way, I've got some goodies in the back of the van for later."

"It'd better not be mushy peas again," she said, widening her eyes in mock alarm.

Yesterday I got a bit carried away during a romantic dinner at my place and Kirsty thinks my food fetish is getting out of hand. Whipped cream she can understand, but licking gravy off her nipples seems a step too far.

------------------------------------------

I had set out a romantic dinner for two on a coffin shaped table, covered with a shroud-like cloth. It was laid out with candles, wine and dead roses, but all of the other items were made from junk, salvaged from skips or found in the street. The plates were a broken mirror, the glass crazed and mottled with age. The cutlery was made from welded ragged bits of scrap metal, the edges raw and jagged. The food was real but past its best: at one setting the plate of mirrored glass was piled with bones from a bird's carcass, picked clean of meat; on the other plate was a once rosy apple, shrivelled and starting to decay. I had cut my finger laying the table and drips of dried blood stained the dirty white tablecloth.

I could tell that Dave didn't like my work. He only gave it a cursory glance, shrugged, and then walked around the exhibition space looking at the other students’ work displayed there.

When he dropped me back at home after the show, I didn't invite him in, as I usually would. We were both subdued and Dave seemed lost in his own thoughts. I unexpectedly found myself saying:

"I don't think we should see each other again Dave. I seem to bring out something strange in you and I worry where it will lead."

Dave gulped and stared straight ahead.

"Is this about the pork scratchings I bought you?" he asked, with a catch in his voice.

I recalled the thick chunks of pork crackling, salted and greasy in a clear plastic bag. These were the authentic Black Country experience Dave had said, but I looked at the twisted, fatty curls of skin, some still sprouted with coarse hair, and recoiled. They looked altogether too human for my liking.

"I'm sorry Dave, but I don't want fattening up."

I opened the passenger door and gave him a last look goodbye.