Who Loves You, And Who Do You Love?

With the utmost care. With hands covered in the reddened and shiny skin of a manual worker of considerable age. With slightly trembling, sausage-like fingers Arthur placed the twentieth snail on the stem with the rest. He lent slowly back and squinted at his work. It looked, he thought, almost disturbing. It looked like nothing more than a hellish stalk of sprouts.



“Nate honey, give your dad’s door another knock please. Tell him it’s almost ready.”
The ten year old boy slid from the chair by the table where he’d been making spirals out of spilled salt, barely stopped to yank a roasted carrot from the oven tray in his mother’s hand, and darted through the low doorway which led to his father’s study. Genine heard his quick staccato knocks bounce off the rather heavy door that sometimes seemed to form a line of demarcation between Peter and the rest of the household. Nate’s voice, still a distance away from breaking, came to her, followed by unintelligible and deeper sounds. Peter no doubt saying he wouldn’t be long. Busying her hands amongst the trays and pans in front of her, transferring steaming vegetables and arranging thick slashes of meat just so, Genine worked to soothe the kernel of frustration which was making itself known in her abdomen. This is just how it, how he, is and it’s a waste of time and energy getting worked up about it. He was always five or ten minutes late whenever he was locked up in his study, which was virtually everyday since he’d gone freelance. By concentrating on making sure everyone got the same amount of sprouts she managed to control the brief fizz of annoyance.


SinBad4SickJerk looked up into the tiny camera set above the screen of his laptop. He ripped the black electrical tape with his teeth, allowed the small matt roll to drop to the bed and patted the end flat. He wondered how many were watching today. It could just be the five anonymous day-pass surfers and the three fulltime members who had identified themselves to him. It could be thirty, fifty, a thousand for all he knew. XtreamViews.NU allowed members to watch unseen. You knew the rules when you joined. If you go live you can’t choose who see’s you. This ignorance went some way to keeping him incredibly aroused whenever he was in front of the camera. The ignorance and the poppers. The electric butt plug set to a random timer. The heaviness of his cock and the odd sensation between his thighs. The tape that he’d patiently wound around his chest flab as he’d knelt on all fours. These things combined had him tuned to a keening ache of arousal. He turned and looked at himself in the mirror on the back of his door. Two purpley red globes the size of golf balls sat above an inch and a half of black tape. His nipples looked to be swollen to three times their usual size, standing proud like the sacs of near-gorged ticks. Greying chest hair frilled out from the tape, like a pair of halos. A garish Mexican wrestlers mask, all red, white and black sequins forming fat zigzags, hid his face, Above this sat an old blonde wig he’d taken from his wife’s belongings three years ago, and which she’d never seemed to notice having gone. It had taken him an hour to comb, tease and bind it into two identical pig tails. Both arms were tightly bound in cling film either side of the elbow, which allowed movement, and each had a scattering of dress-making pins pressed against his skin. They worked in tandem with the butt plug, delivering him unpredictable spikes of beautifully bearable pain.



Nate walked back into the kitchen with the exaggerated air of defeat that only ten year olds can truly master – shoulders forced down, feet dragging and a heavily downturned mouth swayed side to side by the metronome movements of his head.
“Mum, if Dad stays in his study for another five thousand years, and I knock on it like that twice a day and my knuckles get quite big because I’ll be a man then, do you think I’ll wear that door out?”
Genine decided to smile when she saw Nate’s slightly challenging expression. He was frustrated at his usual lack of success – perhaps once a month his dad opened the door when he knocked, seemingly just to surprise him. He was now trying to entice her into an utterly pointless debate which he would eventually win by a combination of childish logic and cold, relentless attrition.
“What I think is that if your father hasn’t made an appearance in five minutes, you can go and try your luck with your granddad instead. Guaranteed win, there. Back of the net.” Genine instantly despised herself. Back of the net? Jesus…
“Granddad’s room smells funny.”
“Don’t be horrible, Nate.” It did, though. It smelled damp and mossy, which was impossible because they’d just had the whole house damp-proofed and re-pointed.
“Anyway granddad’s weird and boring and he smells as well.”
His mother drew in a workable amount of air sharply through her nostrils. Nate didn’t look at Genine but his change of posture said he realised this might be pushing it a little too far. He flinched, or tensed, somehow seemed smaller to her. She exhaled as gently as she could.
“Your granddad is the same as everyone else in the world. He’s been brilliant, he’s been awful, he’s had years of happy boredom and moments of terrible pain. He’s lived his life mainly alongside your granny and now he’s living without her.”
“I miss her, mum.”
“So do I, poppet, but neither of us miss her in the same way that he does. He doesn’t smell, but his pipe does. He isn’t boring; he just doesn’t understand a lot about today’s world. And he’s certainly not weird. He’s just coping with everything getting weird on him. So come over here and give your mum a cuddle, eh?”



‘Stufffucker UK40 has entered the room’

He liked Stufffucker. He’d watched him sat in his cheap computer chair, wearing a tight, shiny mask of black latex. A modest six inch dildo protruded from both the forehead and the chin, and he’d seen both used, as well as the man’s own long and slender penis. He’d once seem him use all three, in turn, to penetrate what looked like a dead cat. On one occasion he’d seen him fuck a handful of his own shit.



Genine finished folding the cotton napkin and placed it on the table in front of Nate. His face was fixed in concentration.
“So do me four more, as close to that as you can and I’ll go and tell May to come down in a bit.”
Nate was going to fold the napkins in the way a robot would. His movements would be precise and minimal. He would fold them all identically and would take exactly the same amount of time on each. Like a machine.



SinBad4SickJerk’s laptop beeped and a video box appeared in the top right corner of the screen. Stufffucker UK40 was privating him with a request. Instead of sound, a text box at the bottom of the link relayed the question. He reached over to the box at the other end of his desk and picked out a blood red lipstick. Facing the mirror he clumsily wrote, in stacked letters starting at his throat, the words ‘slut hole’. The letters ended a little way above his tunnel of a navel, so he added a downward facing arrow to fill the space.



Genine was having an argument of sorts with May, their eldest. The argument was being held in slow and quiet words but they managed somehow to suggest both volume and vehemence, although neither quality was actually present. Genine, having performed a knock-and-enter-all-in-one-go, was wondering what May had been looking at on her laptop that made her pull an almost pantomime face of shock before closing down the page. May was trying to engage her mother philosophically, arguing that the absence of a reason for an action does not, in fact, render the act questionable. Mid-forties meets mid-teens. Genine was feeling old and tired as it was and really should, she thought, just let it go. More tiring was the argument raging in her own mind, where noise and anger had never seemed an issue.

“Big deal, she’s looking at porn you fucking hypocrite…”
This howled by a slimmer, younger her complete with an asymmetric bob, a T-shirt dress that barely covered her arse, and someone else’s boyfriend.

“For all I know she’s buying industrial strength laxatives and branded razor blades!”
A fatter, drabber and clearly addicted to Marie Claire her was bellowing, simultaneously managing to cross her ham-like arms and thump the table at the same time.



SinBad4SickJerk hisses~ ‘We’ve chatted before. You like it really nasty, don’t you?’

Stufffucker UK40 whispers~ ‘We have, and I do. Never seen anyone as disgusting as you, you fucking hole. You get me so hot. What’s under the arrow, you filthy shit?’

SinBad4SickJerk hisses~ ‘I can see I get you hot… You love rubbing it to me don’t you? You need help, my friend ’

Stufffucker UK40 whispers~ ‘Stop typing, man-whore, and show me your diseased cock…’

SinBad4SickJerk hisses~ ‘I’ve never gone this far before… what I’ve done to it… makes me gag just thinking about it, let alone looking at it….’

Stufffucker UK40 whispers~ ‘STOP FLIRTING, YOU PIECE OF SHIT, AND SHOW ME YOUR FUCKING COCK! I’M FIT TO FUCKING BURST!’



“So what exactly is it you think I was looking at? When you crashed into my room?”
“MY room – it’s my name on the mortgage. Water glasses to the left, May, for god’s sake.”
“Sex? Porno? Is that it mum? Or pro-ana sites? That’s it isn’t it? My god – I’m a size fourteen for god’s sake.”
“May I’m not having this discussion now. If you still feel exercised…”
“Exerci…”
“Enough. Enough. Cutlery out now. Nate, where’s granddad? No answer? Ok, try dad one more…”
“No need, I’m here. What’s on? I’m starving.”



Genine thought her smile would grind into powder but it held as she turned to Peter. Behind her Nate swivelled in his chair to face his dad. Just like a robot would.
“Roast pork with all the trimmings. You go and get dad and I’ll open some wine. Frascati alright?”



Five minutes later Nate was seeing if he could hold his hands, palms at 90 degrees, either side of the rim of his plate without shaking, and exactly the same amount of micrometres apart. Pretending that the plate was a swirling, burning comet aiming at Dorchester helped. As did imagining that his hands were a quickly jerry-rigged cross between tractor beams and electro magnets. Opposite him May was muttering a conveyor-belt litany of potentially scandalous websites.
“Swan rape? Jihadi bomb making made easy? Patricide? Badger baiting?”



Genine could feel, in her forehead, that she was drinking the wine too quickly but was just in the process of deciding that she didn’t give a flying fuck when Peter jogged down the stairs and into the large flag-stoned kitchen.
“No answer, hon. Been knocking for an age, called his name. Nothing. Couldn’t hear anything through the door either, but with I’m not surprised. Heavy bloody things…”
Genine felt nothing as she stared at Peter. He shot a quick look at their children.
“You don’t think…… Ahh, do you think I ought to, y’know, kick it in? Just… in case.”



They followed him up the stairs in order of age, Genine wondering where the bleachy odour had appeared from, May fleetingly imagining in which way she’d portray her grief at school tomorrow, and finally Nate, who had just thwarted his Dalek pursuers by using his superior robotic limb technology.




Genine was just thinking about how unlikely it was that a desk-bound fellow like Peter could kick in any sort of door when his foot flashed past her and, with a depressingly mundane thud, made the heavy oak to swing inwards.


Somehow they all rushed into the room at the same time. Equally in unison, May screamed in unadulterated shock, Peter retched, yelled ‘Sin…’, stumbled forward and fell flat on his face, and both Genine and Nate yelled ‘DAD!’


On the bed, semen coated snails fell one by one into the nest of grey pubic hair as Arthur’s sizeable but shrinking penis denied them further purchase. There was no lifting and falling of the chest and, unseen under the grotesque mask, his lips were turning an unpleasant shade of blue. On the desk opposite, in the top left corner of the laptop’s screen, a figure with a small jute sack over his head, eye holes torn in the fabric, and appearing to be wearing a wedding dress, silently bucked and swore his way through an orgasm as, on the carpet below him, the delicate spool of the Glenridge family slowly unwound