The Erotic Adventures of Charles and Isobel

A wealthy industrialist couple sprawled on a beast-legged futon sob over a new video that came this overcast morning by airplane from the pornography district in working-class Sweden. The film considers the relationship between a 'young fox' and amateur pornographer, Charles, and a 'soft swan', the glorious French literature student, Isobel. The film opens in a riot of tumescence as the young lovers complete their first sexual encounter sitting on a scowling hill, kissing each other with blistered lips, then lying fucked under a duvet that covers the gradual oranging of the afternoon. Charles decides to switch from amateur to mature sexual adventure by arranging a few letters. Following hours of late-night mischief with a laptop stolen from a Dutch architecture student and Isobel's correction and conjugation of a feast of French verbs they publish a bilingual guide to the joys of sexual slumming which receives a tide of lukewarm shrugs from pornography critics and contains a collection of explicit diagrams and instructions using words like 'feather' and 'smother' narrated in a chilly, after-orgasm voice by Charles in English and a nimble, gleeful purr by Isobel en francais in simultaneous audio tracks. Unflustered by the rejection of their guide- This must be another world, one of the industrial couple thinks, such diagram and direction texts are so popular- Charles and Isobel adopt a more cultured aesthetic. In a delirious montage one fuzzy summer of amyl nitrate and animal play transforms into a miserable winter of bored fetishism and Cold War Polish opera attendance. While rubbing Isobel's bum and standing in a puddle on the pavement at intermission Charles has his great idea reflected by a sudden explosion of naughty horns from the orchestra.

'The Erotic Adventures Of Charles And Isobel' is the couple's illegitimate son; a bastard text of exquisitely mangled woodcuts of Nordic children's stories that deforms the scenes of wizards, blizzards, whales and woodsmen into 'delicious dances of smut' that become incredibly popular. Charles thus directs Isobel and himself in a film where their own midwinter meeting is unfussily repeated through the pornography lover's familiar layer of digital fuzz. The industrialists discard this repetition in narrative as an opportunity to make coffee and kiss so they miss: the innocent Isobel cadging a cigarette from the trustfund princeling Charles at a bleak midwinter train station. (A subtle deviation from the original there as that first encounter was faraway from frost, trains and fags and occurred on that hill during a heatwave) and falling into conversation with him and quickly- after Isobel's 'sweet rabbit-feet' thump through the rotten fence- fucking in the tall, sweaty grass of a layby, cars droning past, the sky grey and blue, the moon slobbering over their skin. The juxtaposition of motorways and sex is explained by Charles to Isobel during a re-take as a reference to Ballard's masterful Crash which the real couple later read aloud to each other in bed before nodding off mid-sentence, one of Charles' hands paused over Isobel's left breast as if performing a spell. They walk away from the site of their unhealthy, metallic sex the couple walk through fat dull city drizzle, to flat, to gloomy kitchen, removal of dog-scented coats then half-dressed sex over the groaning cooker until legs too tired. moval of dog-scented coats and socks then half-dressed sex over the groaning cooker several times until eyes too tired, too much secreted. He dashed out to a toy shop for twenty eight minutes while she fiddled with the television, tried on some fur-trimmed boots and stomped around the kitchen nude pretending to be a Russian spy, then consumed all the milk and biscuits with lightning speed, was struck with hiccoughs and lay on the sofa, massaging her stomach and talking to it in a soothing voice one would use for a rain-soaked kitten. When the timid tummy feline was eased she used the phone to call Alex from the stairwell who sold the drugs. He came by train with a shaggy-coated Swiss girl named C- he met at the needle exchange last week, used the toilet as C- conversed with our girl in half-breed French/ Flemish about her hiccoughs, then sold her a small bag of colourful pearls which thundered through her stomach superfast so that when her boy returned with his stuff from the toy shop (antlers with synthetic snow, a plastic crown, a bag of glow-in-the-dark stars and magic sequins and a duvet which detailed the constellations in adherence with Ptolemy) she was, how do you say, fucked up? They constructed a den in the dark, snogged and fucked, then passed out, waking just as breakfast began. A freezing and delirious Isobel, overcome by Alex's incredible chemicals, had insisted Charles let her sleep clothed as she was, Russian spy hat, snow-dusted antlers and everything, and then said he had to do something about the heater tomorrow and then murmured various French curses before flopping into the bed, aglow in the chilly winter light, slumped across the constellation of Lupus. Charles was frying out of his skull because he had a pearl on the stairwell with Alex which tasted like bacon and crackled in his stomach like thunder. He tried to argue the huge, aggressive cat which hissed at him on the bed but it was much louder and more eloquent than he was. He thought about fetching a broom from that cupboard which the black kids snuck into to huff glue but realised, No, I can't do that walk now, and began barking which would surely spook the cat away, out the window or into the corner, but the cat began hissing and screeching even more and then suddenly turned away from him and curled up on the bed. He realised then at once that the bed was also the sky. He howled, fled the bedroom, smashed his foot against a table and collapsed. The fridge buzz began taunting him and so he returned to the bedroom. He shook the cat awake and climbed into its paws for warmth. The cat rocked him back and forth and held him above the stars. I don't ever want to fall, he thought. Fading stars spiked across the window when he woke up and Isobel lay in a heap, her antlers snapped and fake snow scattered over her cheek, lost in mutter-land. Charles turned on the television and drifted through the waking stations: testcards, voids, ice skating, dead lakes, a cow... but then there was too much light. Charles phoned someone to fix the heater but the man who ordinarily fixed the heater was away of course, because, Duh, said Isobel, drowning in her duvet, They always are. The windows groaned, aching against their frames, all stiffened by frost. Isobel breathed on the window and drew her face, delicately, slowly, softly, her hair glistening against the icy glass. She watches a small girl wearing a cape disappear into the snow. Pigeons scatter. Charles climbs back into the bed. Isobel finishes her face, falls back into sleep. The sleep falls on them like frost. Light rioting overhead.

give a fuck' but was really, at that very second, at exactly the same the Thundercats theme tune roared in lurid 80s ecstasy, its visuals casting a red beam over Isobel's pale, sicklied face, standing, bruised and booted in the car park of a housing block eighteen miles away, barking at his weary wife about money or cleaning the kitchen or remembering to do something which nobody could hear because this shitty silver car was heading straight for a ditch, and he, the man who fixed the heater, shouted, trying to be heard, but his weary wife in her inherited nightie embroidered with a naval insignia said, You're not much of a Romeo, lit a fag and drew the window narrower, to stop the cold air coming in because it was upsetting their daughter, standing bleary-eyed and breathless expecting breakfast and fearing her ringworm medicine, but the cigarette made her cough, underground pool hall.

Remember 'Rejections' file.

Sleep on him like frost.