‘You do realise that by writing this story in the third person, you make it all sound like it’s about you?’ sneered Justin. ‘You’ll sound like one of those people that ring up radio phone-ins and say “my friend’s got a problem with his cock.” Everyone knows that the real person with a cock-problem is the caller himself.’

Justin had a point. He always had a point. He seemed to take great pleasure in bringing me down like this. But I’d always written the stories as though they weren’t happening to Justin, or to me, but were rather happening to some universal being. They were usually full of sentences like: ‘the woman’s bottom arced upwards allowing, if one so chose, ample opportunity to…’ or: ‘one finds that there are subtle differences in the smells of the female anatomy from region to region.’ Who was this ‘one’?

I watched Justin suck on the sickly-smelling gitane, looking almost impossibly French, impossibly sexual. I tore at the beer-mat and contemplated my very English sense of sexual frustration. Through the window, the big wheel in Bellecour square described its lazy arc across the grey sky. Faraway screams of delight refracted through the glass; to me they seemed somehow unreal.

‘I do realise that,’ I allowed, finally breaking the momentary silence. ‘But I can’t very well tell them the truth, can I? It sounds sick, doesn’t it?’

‘Tell them what you want,’ he grinned, all curly-haired arrogance and broad-shouldered obliviousness. ‘I honestly don’t give a shit. It’s not me that lurks in the corner watching all the time like some German tourist.’

My twin brother knew he held all the aces; he knew that if I had to rely on my own experiences to pen the dirty little sex articles, I wouldn’t even get past the first sentence. Justin was my muse; he’d been the one that had barrelled through the broads of Bratislava, he’d been the one that had sullied the sheets of the senoritas of Seville, he’d been the one that had cracked Krakow. Now he’d heard of the French woman that was fabled to be able to indulge the whole big wheel of his deepest, darkest fantasies, he’d suddenly decided to play hard-ball with me.

Of course, he’d been the one that had discovered the woman during some elaborately seedy trawl of the internet, and he’d been the one to negotiate the commission from the magazine, but I had to write the article, didn’t I? And here he was trying to advise me on how to write the damn thing. It had to be the mysterious ‘one’ that was performing these acts, otherwise I’d be giving myself away as the sick voyeur that I was.

Justin trailed a finger across the rim of his glass of Beaujolais – not cheap despite the assurances of the guide book – and re-crossed his long legs. He didn’t need to note the appreciative looks from the waitress, but I did. I saw how she ate him up with her dark eyes and tried to work out how he could possibly be English. Surely he must have some Mediterranean ancestry? I’d often wondered the same thing myself.

‘I don’t want this story to be all about the sex,’ I muttered. ‘Can’t you, for once, write it yourself?’

‘Not my job, old bean,’ said Justin. He was always calling me things like ‘old bean’, knowing that they’d rile me. What with my unfortunate bean-spout legs and beanish smell, I couldn’t be further away from his sophisticated persona. I’d already been sitting there for half an hour without a drink after gulping my half-pint of Kronenbourg in the manner of a bored ten year old whose father brings token bottles of pop out of the pub for him.

‘What is your job then? A porn star?’ I snapped. ‘I don’t think Mummy and Daddy would be pleased now, would they?’

Justin just smiled infuriatingly and ground out three-quarters of the gitane. Almost in spite of myself, I could hear that voice in my head reminding me that he was wasting the commission even before the article had been written.

We whiled away the rest of lunch in the kind of silence that nobody in their right mind would call companiable. We knew too much about each other; we knew what the other was thinking waaaaaaay before we even knew what was going through our own heads, and somehow I knew that Justin was cooking up some kind of way to punish me for what I already knew. I could hardly bear to let him out of my sight for fear that he’d have a chance to set his plan in motion, but once he’d informed me of his plan to return to the hotel room for a leisurely wank, I knew that my options were severely limited. I decided to play the common or garden tourist for the afternoon instead.

Lyon is a quite majestic city, as you’d expect from a place which has not one, but two grand rivers slicing through it. It is overlooked by a steep hill, crowned with a glittering white basilica. In order to reach the top of the hill, and to be rewarded with the view of the re-roofed city below, one must – unless you are really fond of a brisk hike – utilise the pulley-operated railway system, known as a funicular railway. A funicular railway generally has two carriages on opposing tracks which are attached by a cable; when one carriage ascends, the other descends by some ingenious system of weight and balance.

As I stepped into the carriage which would transport me up to the magnificent Notre-Dame de Fourviere Basilica along with the other binocular-wearers, I reflected that Justin and I have the kind of relationship which could rightly be termed as funicular; we counter-balance each other. The only problem is: Justin always has to be the one that has to be in the ascendancy.

I wondered, absently, how I might be able to work a funicular railway into one of my stories… one of my real stories, not one of the porn-tour tales. It could be a thriller – I don’t know if I remember it from a film, but I could picture some amazing cliff-hanger scene where the villain is being pursued by the detective. I could describe each of these magnificently single-minded men as being in opposing carriages; the story’s climax would be the moment that the two cars pass, and both men realise some deep truth about themselves when they looked into the eyes of the other. It could be like the scene in Heat when Bobby De Niro and Al Pacino finally sit together in that restaurant.

But instead of being in the middle of a thriller, I was stuck in the middle of some awful gross-out comedy; National Lampoon’s European Vacation. While Justin was back in our shared hotel room gaily pulling on his pud, I had, yet again, become the tragi-comic counter-point.

It must have been half-term for French schools, because the carriage was chock-full of miserable-looking families on their way up to look at the basilica. On the seat in front of me, a young boy had a pretzel wedged half-way up his nose and was screaming blue-murder about it. I watched as his sister pretended to try to work the pretzel free, but instead shoved it further into the poor boy’s brain. There was a look of sheer delight on her face as she twisted it still further, and hence probably denied the boy the chance of ever becoming a lawyer when he was older. The mother and father refused to be drawn into the shenanigans; father was staring resolutely at some graffiti on the chair in front of him, and mother seemed to expend all of her available energy on wrapping her teeth around some tired-looking bubble-gum in ever more extravagant ways. What the hell were people like this going to look at a basilica for? Maybe, like me, they felt that they needed to be saved.

As well as families, the carriage seemed over-loaded with quiet-talking teenagers. Aside from some of the sex parties that Justin’s depravities forced me to visit, I’d never seen so many straps and wires as on that carriage. Every time I stole a look at one of the voluptuous young girls, they’d open their mouths and display these awful metal torture-implements which were strapped to their teeth. The strapping boys were all weighed down with luminous rucksacks, leashed across them at the shoulders and crotch. I remember when I was at school it was only cool to wear one strap very loosely around one shoulder, but here they looked as though they were on some mountain-trek rather than in a bloody cable car.

I tried to make myself inconspicuous; not an easy task when you are six-foot four and simply long everywhere. I heard them whispering about me, even though I hardly knew what they were saying. I caught brief mentions of the word ‘anglais’ and then muffled sniggers. I was sure that I heard another kid say something like ‘giraffe.’

When we reached the station, any relief at being free from Justin had been trampled out of me by the stamping feet of my own paranoia. I stood back and let the miserable French families off the carriage and followed slowly after them, humiliated. Instead of being happy to be on my own, I now longed to be able to hide behind my brother, whose very presence would have hushed the whole carriage into some kind of respectful awe. Instead, without my counter-balance, I staggered around the basilica and onto the viewing platform like some uncoordinated child. I felt like I’d been the one with a pretzel stuck in my brain.

The whole of Lyon lay spread out before me like – why could I only think of writing ‘the ripe fruit between a woman’s legs’ here? I had been infected by Justin’s sickness. I should have tried harder to ignore the boisterous wailings of pornography and instead write of the drama of the tower-blocks, shoulder to shoulder with the slick pencil – cock?!? – no; the towering – phallus?!? – Radisson Hotel, being – jerked off!?! – by the passing cranes.

I got that awful feeling again that far from ‘not harming anyone,’ my sex stories were starting to muck me up. Why else could I only see the hotel as an erect penis? Justin once told me that every city has to have at least one building which looks like a cock – look at London with its ‘Gherkin’ – but surely the writer in me could have appreciated the hotel as a pencil instead..

As if on cue, my mobile phone began to vibrate in my pocket: Justin. Sighing, I snatched it out of my pocket before any more of the passing French families could hear that my ring-tone was ‘You Sexy Thing’ by Rod Stewart – Justin must have changed it while I was in the toilet or something.

‘Hello Justin,’ I sighed. ‘Nice wank?’

I thought I could say things like that seeing as though I was in France and nobody understood me. Unfortunately, the raised eyebrows of a tourist-father who passed me told me that I was wrong.

‘Freakin-A,’ said Justin, safe in the knowledge that he was the sort of person that could rattle off phrases like that even in an assembly at school, and still everyone would look at him with indulgent smiles. ‘Only thing is… oh, it doesn’t matter…’

‘What’s up? You don’t sound as relaxed as you’d usually be?’ I asked.

‘I’m not sure, but I think that some of that cheese might be repeating on me,’ said Justin. And it probably was; the amount that he had stuffed down his throat.

‘But what about…’

‘I can’t do it… gonna have to go now… need the toilet…’

Abruptly, Justin clicked off. Abruptly, I realised the ‘fun’ had been taken out of our funicular relationship. It’s all good fun, this up-down, in-out, until the whole thing breaks down and we’re left dangling from a cable, trying not to look at the drop.

High-school French could only get me so far, I realised. Unless I wanted to ask the way to the boulangerie or the charcuterie, and the answer was ‘tout droit’, then I was absolutely and utterly lost. Oh sure I could tell her that I loved ‘jouer au tennis’ or whatever it was, but I couldn’t tell her that the pain in my scrotum was becoming unbearable. All I could do was point, with increasing desperation, at my shrivelled-up penis and hope that she eventually got the message. That she wasn’t a trained pharmacist (as far as I could see) or the mild mannered alter-ego of some superhero-doctor didn’t help matters either.

What the woman was trained in was the dishing-out of fearsome punishment to her submissive male company. Oh, she was probably Michelin-starred for that particular dish. If Lyon was the gastronomic capital of France, then this frog’s legs were the fucking most painfully expensive dish on the menu. Was this really what Justin had signed up for, or was it, as I had originally suspected, some kind of revenge for something I didn’t even know that I’d done?

I tried to bite my tongue to stop myself from screaming. In the corner of my eye, I could see that she had turned and was about to perform another catwalk-show across my pulverised body. Those high-heels! They looked as though they would pierce right through me; spear me to the ground. How could anyone in their right mind enjoy this torture?

‘Stop!’ I managed to gasp as she rammed the first of those spikes into my tender flesh.

The woman simply smiled and stamped down her other foot onto my bubbling belly. Inevitably, I flinched and tried to throw her off me. She stood back, one hand on her hip, the other waving a single finger in mock traffic-cop warning to me to behave. She was still smiling, and deep down, I understood that she somehow must have thought that I was enjoying it.

‘Can’t you just tell me what you… doooooo to people,’ I sniffed, trying not to cry. As I said the word ‘do’, she lowered a spike onto my right testicle. Gently at first, she started to twist her heel. The spike responded by grinding down onto the twisted nerve and sinew, the muscle and blood which made me a man. I couldn’t look; an image of a pickled onion being speared by a bloodthirsty pitchfork flashed in front of my closed eyes. I felt as though my whole skin had been turned inside out.

‘I don’t need the physical evidence of this… I’ll just write anything. Just let me go!’ I yelled. The woman paused from her trampling for a moment and looked me up and down me with wide eyes. I realised that she was telling me what my own body hadn’t told me, that one part of me was actually enjoying this torment. I’d risen to the occasion like… like the damn cock-shaped hotel which we were playing in at that very moment.

I’ve always felt that if I ever went to see a prostitute, I’d be the kind of wet lettuce that would suddenly want to ‘simply talk’, as though said lady of the night would have all of the answers I’d been looking for all of my life. I’d imagined that I’d be a disappointment to even women who were being paid to keep me company. I hadn’t bargained on ever meeting Madame Obelix (or whatever she was called) in Lyon, the lion’s den. I wasn’t a disappointment to old Obelix; I can tell you that. She must have waited her whole life to be able to shout such abuse at a very English, very pathetic male such as me.

‘You sex tourists, you are all the same,’ roared the woman, evidently very capable of understanding, and speaking English. Why hadn’t she listened to be earlier, when I was pleading for mercy?

‘But I’m not a… that is my twin brother,’ I stammered.

‘A likely story,’ bellowed Obelix. The phallic candle-holders shuddered with fear.

‘I’m sorry,’ I moaned, before finally passing out, head buried in the hotel’s thick white shag.

We met in the shadow of the big wheel in Bellecour. I had made sure that I was early, so Justin wouldn’t see me limping across that vast expanse of red gravel, but he still saw the horror in my eyes.

‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ I said, flashing him a warning look when he finally thought to ask me what was wrong. ‘What about you? How’s the old bowels?’

‘Seem to have cleared up a treat, old bean,’ said Justin. ‘Do you know what? I had the most wonderful evening. I felt better almost as soon as I’d put the phone down. I walked up to the old basilica. The whole city was spread out before me like…’

‘Like a woman?’ I asked, wearily.

‘No; like peanut butter on toast… All of the little lights sparkled… it was magical. I saw it with the eyes of a child.’

‘Magical? Eyes of a child?’ I demanded, half-crazily.

‘And you could see clusters of mistletoe in the trees, like discarded pompoms!’ continued Justin. ‘For a while there, I could see what you get out of coming to all of these places and just experiencing them.’

My feet described a wounded cowboy’s last stand across the red gravel of the square as we headed towards the café for our evening meal. I suddenly had the horrible feeling that the cable which held our funicular relationship together had snapped and I was plunging deeper into hell. Justin, meanwhile, had somehow been left at the top, head in the clouds. And free.

ENDS

A.J. Kirby