Exclusive Extract from Lean Cat, Savage Cat with Introduction by Writer Lauren J Joseph

Lean Cat, Savage Cat by Lauren J. Joseph is out now!

“Have you ever been possessed? So passionately in love, or so overwhelmed with grief, so fixated on a project that you lose yourself entirely? Charli, the protagonist of “Lean Cat, Savage Cat”, is in just such a state of triangulated obsession. She’s head over heels with her charismatic and somewhat sinister lover, Alexander, she’s pouring all of her energy and talents into his career in order that she might avoid the thing she cannot face. Naturally such a set up does not make for an easy ride, especially when Charli rather impulsively follows Alexander to Berlin. There amongst the flaming creatures of bohemian self-creation and self-destruction alike she has to navigate a unfamiliar landscape of bruised egos and mercenary doppelgängers.

This is a book about excess, addiction, sexual psychosis. It’s also a love story, haunted by the spectral presence of David Bowie. It’s a story of queer counterculture’s ongoing struggle against appropriation and a commemoration of the trans women whose influence was whitewashed out of the history of rock’n’roll. It’s also horny af. There is no cutting away to the curtains when Alexander and Charli get down to it, no. “Lean Cat, Savage Cat” represents a rejection of the cultural conservatism our era seems determined to force on us. It is raucous and expansive and I hope you will enjoy reading it.” - Lauren J Joseph

Read our exclusive extract from Lean Cat, Savage Cat below.

I picked up a €4 bottle of vodka for the road and went on to Enklave alone. I knew that I shouldn’t really go, but I didn’t have the strength of character to take myself home. I swigged as I tottered on down, the most peculiar tombola of feelings rattling around and around within me: lust, exhaustion, inebriation, dejection, and as I walked, I recognised that I really was sore at Alexander. My emotions have always been on something of a time delay. I told myself that I deserved better than a man who yo-yoed in and out of my life for a quick fuck or a place to crash. I was really getting cross – vodka makes me moody – and giving him a real talking to in my head when I realised that I didn’t know where I was going, I didn’t have the address. Finley and Ryan had always taken me over.

It was a moonless March night and I didn’t have a phone for guidance, but somehow I got there all the same, independent of my conscious mind, like a driverless car. I walked for a while towards Karstadt, my cynosure. I knew Enklave was around there somewhere, so I just wove about the streets for a while hoping to pick up the vibrations. Eventually I recognised the place from the sight of two boys in leather puppy masks scampering out from an Altbau and into the night, chucking a glass bottle away behind them.

Enklave was in the basement of a residential building, totally illegal of course. It was the local speakeasy that the neighbours didn’t know about, and the owners wanted to keep it that way. I had to ring a doorbell and wait in the street, even as it started to rain, until someone scurried out, finger on their lips, to escort me silently into a cellar, soundproofed with mattresses. It was, as Polly said, a total fire trap. It was something like being led into a cave to participate in the Dionysian mysteries – you never knew when or in what state you might emerge, only that once you were inside all bets were off. It was really just a hole in the ground, but always so well filled.

The soupy subterranean atmosphere hit me hard as soon as the cellar door peeled back. Most people were topless; everyone was dancing. I pushed right in. I stuffed my coat behind some pipes, tied my shirt around my waist, began to bop about in my bra, alone and unhindered. It had been too long since I’d gone out dancing. Alex loved dancing too, he moved beautifully, but no, I did not want to think about him right now.

I took a good long slug from my bottle of vodka, bad form I know, but I hardly bothered to conceal it. I slid further into the crowd where I might be more fully lost, elbow to elbow with some androgynous twinks, shimmying through, palms open, to find myself a little strip at the heart of the action, boogying between a man who could’ve been that creep from Crystal Castles and two ripped dykes grinding together like the molars of a lazy student on results day. I was sloshed and quite delighted with myself, barely cognisant of the ditch I was driving into. This was the point of the exercise: distraction, pretermission. I was twirling around to what was possibly Aphex Twin, arms up in a showstopper V, giving it the full girl-gone-wild, gyrating murderously when I slammed right up against West, who was at least as far gone as I.

‘Wow, Charli!’ he shrieked. ‘Charli, you look so fucking hot! and he started kissing me.

And I kissed him back, instinctively and without restraint. I ran my fingers through his hair, dragging my nails over his scalp, squeezing at his plump, full arse, the two of us stumbling in a passion about the dance floor, then from the dance floor to a slimy wall where we went at it even harder. I pinned him to the brickwork, he smelled like booze and sweat, and he moaned in my ear above the belt of the music, ‘Charli, Charli,’ I felt his cock stiffen as the room revolved around me, he kissed me again.

‘Fuck,’ he slurred a hiss in my face, ‘I’ve wanted to do that for so long.’ ‘I know,’ I smiled, ‘I know,’ and groped his arse again.

The magenta probings of a cheap disco club light strobed across us, then off around the room and back again, making fifteen-second circles, and each time the light hit his beautiful face, that face seemed to flicker and change, now sweetened in drunken pleasure, now unfocused and unsteady, now ghoulish, now groaning, now boyish and shy. I took his zipper between my thumb and forefinger, tugged at it playfully, then began to slide it down. He looked a little startled but smirked. ‘Wow!’ he hiccupped, ‘somebody knows what she wants.’

Around us the party went on. Nobody paid the blindest bit of attention – we had this damp strip of wall to ourselves, and we made good use of it. West’s head jammed between my breasts as I toyed with his dick through the fly of his jeans, proving to myself that I was a free woman, even in this unfree world. A bassline, a clear favourite, subzero and synthetic, set the crowd howling and brought their bodies ever closer together, the last of the wallflowers surging towards the scrum, cigarettes in hand, the bartender screaming ‘Wahoooo’ from behind his stopgap bar top, punching the air, out of time.

And somehow the disco lights seemed to increase in speed, wheeling around on a relentless orbit, the way a room spins about you when you rise from a chair too quickly, and I started to feel very strange. Gone were the slow shadows over West’s face; now the light whipped around ever quicker as we kissed, showing him by turns fiendish, frantic and ecstatic, now with the icy leering countenance of Alexander himself.

I flinched and West giggled, ‘Wha? What’s wrong?’ and though I think it was his voice ringing over the synth pop, I wasn’t sure whether it was his face.

I pulled back a little, panicked, shaking my head to clear my vision, with this catalogue of countenances continuously scrolling over the space marked West. Even when I held myself still and rigid my head spun on until I thought I might puke and West started asking, ‘Are you alright? Charli, are you feeling OK?’ Only while he did so he seemed to be looking out at me through Alex’s eerie green eyes; they caught the purple of the strobe light each time it ran, glinting like jewels the baroque faithful once stuffed into the sockets of revered patrons and martyrs.

‘I’m fine,’ I lied, ‘I think maybe I drank too much. I just need some air.’

Of course he offered to take me outside, said he’d take me home in a cab if I needed him to, ‘Just so you’re OK, like,’ and though I was grateful for his chivalry, I was too alarmed, too disturbed to accept. If I was cracking up again, I needed to be alone.

‘Call me,’ I said.

‘I did!’ he replied. ‘Are you sure you’re OK? It’s no problem, I can take you home.’

I shrugged off his assistance and slithered away and up the stairs solo with his voice ringing in my ears, ‘Charli, where are you going?’ I was back at street level before I’d even finished buttoning my shirt up, and halfway home before I realised I’d left my coat behind.