On the Road of Excess

This is not your everyday story of text and drugs and sex and Ecstasy. For a start, Helen Walsh, Warrington-born author of Brass, a visceral first-person novel told from the point of view of a young urchin with a taste for drink, ‘beak’ and sex with hard men and prostitutes alike, was a real wild child, dropping her first E before she had her first period, taking off to Barcelona at the age of 16 before returning to the fold chastened, having acquired enough raw experience for a life of writing.

But Walsh is neither PC pornographer, chick-lit peddler with a Loaded bent, nor frothing feminist. Huddled in her coat in Buswell’s hotel, she is just a writer on the publicity trail, a 26-year-old Malaysian-English beauty more likely to be seen spread across the pages of Arena than Pencil Sharpener’s Monthly sure, but a hardcore (in the textual as much as sexual sense) writer nonetheless. Sheepshagger author Niall Griffiths describes Brass as working on the reader “like a binge or a spree – by the time you realise you’re on one, it’s too late; you’re captured, trapped and transfixed by a horrible fascination as to how and when it’s going to end.”
And while it’s not what you might call the most intricately plotted novel of recent times, the depth of characterisation and the sheer drive of the language make for a pretty intense and at times gutter-poetic reading experience – as befits a book with a Rimbaud quote for an epigraph.
In Brass, the main protagonist Millie is an unapologetically rapacious and sexually predatory young woman. Curiously enough, the rhythms of her language bear more resemblance to famous passages written by men utilising the female voice – Molly Bloom’s soliloquy at the end of Ulysses, the harrowing ‘Tra La La’ section of Selby’s Last Exit – than most women writers per se. Walsh will deny that Millie is aping male behaviour, yet acknowledges that few women write with the sort of alpha-female instincts you can see in any city centre bar or nightclub on a Saturday night.
“In terms of women, the only female novelist recently that I discovered was Maggie Estep,” she says, “you really should dig out her book Soft Maniacs. There’s a lot of women characters in her book that do real male arcane things, but it’s presented in a non-sensationalist, non-titillating way and it’s so normal, it’s such a part of the everyday landscape that it’s legitimised. But it’s interesting you know, I hate to use this kind of gender access, but most women, apart from Natasha Walters who loved it, I’ve had a real public stoning from feminists and women’s rights groups. But the thing is, I never set out to write a political novel, and that was the whole thing of Millie’s character. The sex isn’t political, it’s just dirty and it’s crude and it’s animalistic and it’s about instinct and raw desire in the crudest sense; it’s fucking as opposed to . . . it hasn’t got a sociological access to it. But women want to criticise the sex and criticise Millie’s character and say it’s damaging to feminism.”
Why does she think that is?
“I don’t know. I think women are very frightened by that kind of sexuality. It’s such hypocrisy, because feminism is apparently about wanting the same rights as men, and you get a character like Millie who runs in a very male world…”
But she’s not a ladette. It’s not about swilling pints and acting like a rugger-bugger. She just has a taste for young women as well as older men.
“No, she’s totally not a ladette. But she doesn’t suffer guilt or think about the repercussions of sex in a way that a lot of women do and therefore restrain themselves and repress themselves. She’s just very honest and frank. I found when I did my first batch of interviews, journalists, especially the British press, and women, they’re so desperate to not so much pigeonhole you, but they don’t like you, in terms of your sexuality or gender, being slippery or evasive in any way.”
Well, hermaphrodite sea anemones don’t give a fuck.
“Exactly. But I don’t know, I mean, I grew up as a tomboy, my parents were fairly relaxed with that and it was only in adolescence that I became aware of two discreet genders, and from those genders there’s one sexuality. I kind of felt like a pariah for a lot of my adolescence ’cos I didn’t even like the word bisexual, I never saw myself as bisexual, as gay, as straight, never really saw myself as a girl but never saw myself as a boy either. I was always comfortable with my body, with my anatomy, but I still now find it very difficult to socialise and interact with girls, they just freak me out, they frighten me so much, whereas with men I’m really relaxed. I just find women really different creatures.”

One aspect of Brass that has received praise from all quarters is its sex-scenes. “She has the best – as in the most honestly and evocatively described, not necessarily the highest quality – sex of any contemporary fictitious sex I’ve read,” wrote Zoe Williams in The Guardian. I concur, but I think the reason is not because of Walsh’s chosen subject matter, but her descriptive process. Anybody can have sex, do drugs and play rock ‘n’ roll; precious few can capture the experience in prose.
Check out the following passage in which Millie has a random encounter with a prostitute in a flat that looks “like the consulting room of a backstreet abortion clinic”:
“I kneel down behind her. The carpet is coarse and claws at my knees. I part the cheeks of her arse. I run a flat tongue over her cunt and lap her like a dog. She tastes vulgar – rubber and cunt juice and stale, stale sweat. I love it. As the lust in me swells, I have to refrain from asking about the bloke with the ponytail. Is this his spunk I can taste? What did you do? Did he fuck you up the arse? Did you suck his cock? Did he lick you like I am doing now? The images run amok in my head. Him forcing his cock into her tiny arse and fucking her hard and wild. Her cunt soaking, belying the face that feigns such apathy. I bet you love getting fucked don’t you? I bet you lie awake at night, wanking over your punters.”
Everybody says the British can’t write sex. Did Walsh think ‘this is good shit’ as she was writing some of the scenes in Brass?
“Yeah,” she laughs.
Why? Did she get aroused?
“Yeah I did, totally. I mean, more so with the last sex scene with Sean, I was really, really kind of horned up about that. I dunno, I just found writing them so easy and they were the only parts of the novel that when I went back to them after finishing the manuscript, I never edited or honed or tweaked them. They were very crude and raw and I thought, ‘That’s how sex actually is.’ It is so raw and earthy and I wanted to leave those grammatical mistakes and leave it as it is…”
One of the most refreshing aspects of Brass is the almost total absence of sexual guilt. One suspects a lot of the flak Walsh has received comes from her non-PC stance (she claims that while at college she blew her first student loan in two weekends on lap dancing binges) and a refusal to approach the subject of prostitution from a moralistic standpoint or characterise sex-workers as victims-by-definition.
“I think that’s the defining part of, not so much Millie’s sexuality, but her personality more than anything,” she says. “She’s presented as a very, very pretty little waif, alabaster skin, bright brown eyes, very skinny, the kind of girl all men fall in love with and all women want to look after. And she would have no problem pulling a beautiful looking girl or a beautiful male. But she doesn’t even go to escorts, which she could afford. She goes to the lowliest kind of street waifs – in Liverpudlian terms, we call streetwalkers ‘brass’ – and I think that sets her apart, and a lot of those deviant impulses are brought out by drink and drugs.”
Walsh herself has plenty of prior experience in this area. After the decline of the rave era, the author became involved with a few dodgy boyfriends and got into shoplifting designer clothes, pick pocketing and hovering up coke. She left town for reasons she usually prefers not to discuss, but it doesn’t take a genius to work it out: young doe-eyed E-head gets involved with the Class A crowd, next stop, a big fat drug debt and no means of paying it off. She fetched up in Barcelona, befriended a transvestite called Angel, worked as a ‘fixer’, introducing johns to prostitutes, and took her first female lover. Soft landing?
“Initially yeah, but the same kind of things happened again,” she says. “I mean, as a young girl I saw it as an inalienable right that people gave me drugs and gave me things ’cos they thought I was this nice bolshy kid who was getting away with it. As I got older people weren’t so lenient or protective, it was kind of, stand on your own two feet. And that was one of the reasons for me leaving Barcelona.”
Walsh returned to Liverpool and attended university, scoring the highest sociology mark in eight years. An unsatisfactory stint in London at a film and literary agency left her feeling isolated and disillusioned, so she moved back home to live with her mother. There followed a cycle of drunken sprees, blackouts, depression, self-mutilation, and eventually, nine months of writing the karmic get-out-of-jail-free card that was Brass at her mother’s kitchen table. She’s now working with socially excluded teenagers in North Liverpool and writing her second novel, having swapped E’s and whiz for the buzz of prose.
“It was only when I got to 17 or 18 that I kind of woke up to the fact that, ‘Christ, I’d really been flirting with dangerous men but I’ve gotten away with it and I can’t get away with it any longer,’” she says. “So of course when it came to paying up time and I had to go out and buy my own cocaine I thought, ‘Sod it, I’d rather give up!’”

Brass is out now published by Canongate