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Biche Excerpt

CHAPTER ONE- The Sleeping Bag Dream

For three days I have lived off four cans of green lentils, two baguettes and a 20 franc pork chop cut up into three rations so that I can budget for the research of a deed which, to be honest, I have been dreaming of ever since I was eight years old.
 	In those days it was my English teacher, Mrs Kant, who was the object of my desire and the protagonist in a logistically dubious yet persistent fantasy scenario which involved freezing cold weather conditions, a one-man tent and one member of the wrong sex.
 	Mrs Kant and I would be doing the Duke of Edinburgh Award in mid-winter Cornwall. We would get stuck on Dartmoor in heavy snow and we would have only one sleeping bag between us, but we would have to take our clothes off before we got into it because an unorthodox doctor's report had recently shown that you kept warmer that way.
 	I think the outside of the sleeping bag was blue in colour but when I remember distinctly is that the inside was dark and secret and vaguely slippery. The deed never became very concrete; after ten minutes of immersion in that dark, secret place the sleeping bag would disintegrate in my mind like a wisp of smoke, like the slow closing of theatre curtains on an act I was too young to imagine in any more detail.
 	It has taken me three solid nights of keyboard slog on the Minitel to find out what happens behind the curtains. It has taken me so long because sex with a woman seems surprisingly had to come by. Most of the people on the Minitel women-only sex lines are men promising endless cunnilingus or world-weary lesbians accusing you of being a man when you ask what their bodies look like. The Minitel is like an electronic yellow pages which also doubles as a sex contact service. You tap a code name into the tiny computer, cat to people in real time and then, if you are lucky, they give you their phone numbers and you call them up to arrange a rendez-vous. Of course, using the Minitel sex lines is like shopping by post. Like shopping by post it is expensive (4 francs 30 per minute for the X-rated numbers), and you don't know what you are getting until it is too late. What I got when I arrived for my rendez-vous at the Holiday Inn in Place de la République was a spongy-looking woman wearing a ruche-necked blouse over a spongy sort of body. Even beforehand, sitting at a table in the bar, wondering whether to gaze at the bowl of salted peanuts or the nervous smirk plastered all over her spongy face, I wished I was back on Dartmoor in my slippery sleeping bag in the arms of Mrs Kant.

 	When the métro suddenly jolts forward out of Belleville station, I am thrown out of my reverie and nearly into the lap of a powder-grey mink coat, with badger tails hanging off the shoulders and criss-cross leather bits laced up the lapels, worn by a woman who looks like she came back from the dead five times. When I sit back and close my eyes I see a shawl made of raw rabbit embroidered with chicken giblets and pig-trotter shoulder pads. My eyes are sticky and cold from lack of sleep and it feels nicer to keep them closed than contemplate the passengers who sit around me. It is 6.30 a.m and the métro carriage is filled with grim Parisian death heads on their way to work. Their faces, grey and drained of blood, look nauseous as they sit in their blue overalls in the stuffy air and the sepia light. I fold my arms, rest my head on my shoulder and try to rewind to the situation that is responsible for my current post-promiscuity high - a mixture of panic, sexual satiety and ha! ha! ha! how's about bloody that then!

If you haven't had sex in a while, you can forget what a compulsion it is. You can get into solitude and gardening and making cakes. But once you have five orgasms in one night from a one-night stand you want to do the same thing the next night with someone else. You want to have five orgasms with someone with brown hair, then try it with someone tall with curly hair and then with, say, someone with broad shoulders and artistic hands. You kid yourself. You think that you are going to discover some monumental truth about life, about yourself, by having some stranger thrust their genitals against yours after a few glasses of cheap wine. Sex is placed on a pedestal, as if it were more important than gardening or cake making.
 	For those minutes of searing oblivion, you can pack up your troubles in your old kit bag and throb in physical ecstasy as your brain turns to pap and loads of carefully thought-out fantasies spring up in your delirious head: you shagging the baker and his wife from over the road, Donatella Versace whipping you lightly while wearing the silver diamanté cocktail dress from this month's Vogue cover. (And the frontal zip has to be two inches higher than her right knee before you can come.)
 	Whereas all the time you're rubbing less than one-sixteenth of your body in a very ungainly style over your partner of the night- who you went off ten minutes after copping off with- and who now has the facial expression of somebody having their wisdom teeth extracted.
 	Like Sisyphus pushing his stone up the mountain, you think that any minute now there'll be an end to it. The thrill of promiscuity will wane. One day, the prospect of the desperate set piece of kissing, followed by blow job, followed by 69 followed by orgasm, will make you feel like a doomed contestant on the Generation Game conveyor belt. You'll be ripping your victim's clothes of and you'll have a terrible vision of what's coming next: the teasmade, the Persian rug, the badminton set, the bathroom scales and the awful inevitability of the cuddly toy.
 	When you feel grim the next day, you'll console yourself with the thought that once you've popped your latest fantasy (sex under the desk with an American TV executive in smart clothes), then that'll be it. Promiscuity over. Back to the straight and narrow.
 	But of course the cursed stone always comes rolling back down to the bottom of the hill again. I am at the bottom of the heap now. I am irritated because I can think of no way of getting sex within the next twenty minutes with some new body and my head is beginning to throb.
 	Luckily, the Paris métro is lit like a bedroom so when the train stops at La Chapelle station, I close my eyes even tighter and find myself back in Sponge's house last night. We were stoned by the time we got to her bedroom...