From pages 248-249

            He then started to lick. The slamming lid of the red index box up me near decapitated his tongue. He licked me and licked me and licked me and kept licking me till I ran out and bought him a Post Office sponge, and when I came back he was still licking me till I lost count of everything but the precise number of licks. Ah, but he couldn't lick my feel of him away, what I had left on the aching tip of his velvet tree-mushroom silencer sprouting deep in the icy forest. The world outside was nerve-frozen in suspense, all those commandos waiting outside in the siege beyond the siege were playing the Kurdish village for Madame Tussauds' and we were in the bunker hidden between the Pause frames, little did them'uns know that there was a good old bun­ker bunk-up to be had. Two hours he spent licking my ear, warming and lathering its drum of shining pink cellophane. Two weeks he took licking the blue anvils of my shoulder blades and a skiver's fortnight on the flesh-coloured skin running from my tender arm pit to my pearly breast bone. Then he spent three hours licking the blue shadows thrown by my cobbled breasts, hot frost from his mouth swooping down out of the bulb sun and buzzing my tits in all directions, then slowly rolling away towards the clouds. Then his tongue ran dry and cat-rasped, till the moisture on my tits began to gel all over, all over as a freezing lake and then the tongue ran smooth again, a cat's beardmarks in butter, pirouetting and darting through the ice like a new buzz-saw cuts a fishing hole, then it stuck like a child's tongue to a frozen doorknob - "Yargh ye Hy-po-Cryte!" I jeered.

"Turn down the thermostat!" he broke free gasping, great dong swinging wide into the light, a ship's boom and still he licked, or had he stacked the command? For a moment the billowing frost cleared, evaporated by the intense heat, the sweat was lashing off him. In sec­onds the grey shroud fell once more and we were two aul hookers on skates grappling over one punter - our lust.

Then his licking broke into a run, we were together freezing and delirious, twirling freaks in Replay weather rolling in the snow falling outside on the blushed pavements of some city, with him com ing on shift for work again in flapping shirtsleeves with a fag in his mouth and a jacket slung over his shoulder, coming through the door in love towards me at the oozing sink, we were the freaks of some freeze-frame that could be held and held, we were suicidal Mongols, no helmets in Mongolian winter, with our ears of ice dropping off to streamline the titanium helmets of our skulls. I was a turbanned man wailing from a titanium tipped flying minaret, "Oh you're heavenly heavenly, doomed to be better than us all!" while he was saying every­thing people say as they get a good oul ride in - "Victoria. .. Victoria Station - I came just on a three week vacation. That's what I told my lousy lying shitty self. But no way was I ever going home. I slept there the first weeks. Fucking blahdy tregic can you imegine, I was going up to commuters in WH. Smith, asking if they had a job for me. You believe how lousy stupid, so pathetic?"

            Believe it? Was I not fucking it? Was this not the least-worst scenario for two souls locked ballick-naked in a freezing thalaga? We rubbed, we stroked and ached in our sealed environment smeared and obscured with grease. The brushing against and against, the endless clicking, rubbing and flicking of the switches - our mechanical parts hindered our speed. We sounded like a carriage being shunted side­ways beneath a Soho porn shop. Thousands of valves producing such great dull heat that the Night Shift stokers couldn't stay alive in the boiler room outside. Thousands of luminous beetles under my skin were switching, ants scattering from an earthquake in a parched kitchen - in millionths of a second. Fingers in cunt cracking open a rock, cries of discovery as a view came into my mind of Heathrow of the limbo crinkled-iron hangars and breezeblock warehouses with their embar­goed secret parts rustling in crates of softly flammable shavings behind graph wire partitions.