'Marianne Faithful' by Guy Narcissus

MARIANNE FAITHFUL

It was half past three in the morning when the Professor blundered into the student’s pad. She poured some cheap red, turned on a film. Tits. Ass. Soft focus pornography. ‘Do you like her – Marianne Faithful?’

‘Who?’ The Professor’s specialism was Romanticism. He was a world authority on Wuthering Heights.

She curled up beside him on the sofa. ‘Marianne Faithful. Crown Princess of Swinging Sixties. Mick Jagger’s girlfriend. Feminist icon. I’m her biggest fan. I’ve met her three times. She’s beautiful, isn’t she?’

The Professor came over very strange. In vino vertigo. How had he…? Ah yes, he’d been invited out by students to celebrate their graduation, missed the last train home. The student had offered him a bed for the night.

‘Kiss me,’ she said.

So, the Professor kissed her. He’d been engaged for eight years. He’d phoned his fiancée when he missed the last train: she’d heard girls talking, asked who they were. ‘That is what students sound like, darling,’ he’d quipped.

The student seized him by his belt. ‘I want you to fuck me really hard.’

The Professor’s fiancée would never say that. She would witter on about marriage and children, but she would never say that. He seized the student by the hair.

‘Fuck me,’ she said.

It was only after he’d tried fucking her really hard, when the student was snoring quietly into his back, that it struck him why Marianne Faithful.

Sliding out of her arms, he went to the bathroom and was sick, three times. In vomit he foresaw his future: come morning he would go home and confess his unfaithfulness. His fiancée would cry. His fiancée would leave him. There would be no marriage. He sighed, flushed, and felt better. He always felt better after being sick, the sheer relief of it.