Lapiz Lazuli

by Leigh Clark

  I thought, bitterly, that this was how it would be from now on—furtiveness and silence, hiding away and denying the truth of our love—and even so, I thought that better than a life apart. But I had reckoned without Lehera’s wild nature.

  I lay down and pulled her head onto my breast, running my fingers through her hair as we waited for our breathing to slow so that we could make it race with joy again. At some point I fell asleep …

  When I woke the day-birds were just beginning to sing. The garland I had made for Lehera to take home was on the surface of the pool, ripples still spreading out from it as though it had just landed there. Lehera was not in sight.

  For only a few seconds I looked around, expecting her to appear from the forest. Then I knew. I screamed loudly enough to wake the island, and dived.

  Each time I surfaced I screamed again, until the messenger appeared at the pool’s edge. She dived as I rested and for a few minutes, although it seemed like hours, we took it in turns to seek out the black depths in which Lehera might still be alive. Too soon, she shook her head. I ignored her and carried on diving until she dragged me from the water. I was too weak and cold to stop her. I watched as she lit a great smoking fire to alert the Islanders and as soon as I was warm and my limbs stopped cramping, I began to dive again, this time to bring my beloved’s body back into the light.

  We never found her. Despite the best divers, male and female, trying their utmost, nobody could reach the floor of that deep pool. I heard people saying she would float up, when nature was sick of her, but she never did.

  I can see by your faces that this isn’t the story you were hoping for when you came to the Island, all you honeymoon couples. Do you think I’m putting a curse on you? Many people thought Lehera had cursed the God of water with her death, and I knew myself that she’d defied the missionaries’ God and our own moon Goddess, but I told nobody of it.

  They took me home, and no man would have me, for fear I was unlucky. They tore apart the hut we’d shared and cut down the breadfruit trees and burnt it all, to appease any spirit that might be lurking, and I was forbidden to leave my village.

  After a few years people forgot the details of Lehera’s suicide, and I was able to move around the island freely enough, although I never got near the highland pool that held her bones prisoner. An old man lived in a new hut near our former home, and spent all his days keeping any trouble-loving islander from visiting the pool for fear Lehera’s spirit might drag him or her down into the black waters.

  So, for ten years, I did what I’d planned to do. I learnt my craft as a healer. I was as bad-tempered as any teacher in the Maidens’ House, and old before my time, and soon people forgot to keep an eye on me and let me do as I pleased and go wherever I chose. For a few months I stayed away from the pool, but then, as soon as I was sure that I was no longer observed, I began to travel closer and closer to the pool. The place fascinated and terrified me equally. It was the last placed I’d seen Lehera and so it drew me, but I feared that once there, I’d pick up the heaviest rock I could find, bind it to my wrist, and dive down to join her forever.

  Then I heard that a hotel company wanted to build a honeymoon spa on the site of my … our, waterfall. Don’t worry, little love-birds, don’t huddle together in your newly-legalised couples—the spa wasn’t built there. You aren’t sleeping where Lehera and I slept, and laughed and loved. I made sure of that.

  But to prevent the desecration of the pool, I had to go into local politics. I fought to convince Honeymoon Islanders to preserve our beautiful home from rapacious developers, to demand a say in all the tourist proposals, to insist on a fair wage for those working in the honeymoon industry. And the day I won, after years of battle, I went up to the pool for the first time since I’d lost my love. The sun was setting and the sky turned from gold, to bronze, to purple. The waterfall splashed into the black pool and I lay on my back and watched the moon cross the sky. If Lehera wanted me to join her in the watery darkness, I was ready now.

  I’d fallen asleep at the pool once before, but I was wide awake when she came to me. I felt her hands cover my eyes and lay still, smelling the fragrance of the Tahitian gardenia flowers I’d made into a garland for her, even though it was long past their season to bloom.

  “I missed you,” she said. “Why did you stay away so long?”

  I took her wrists in my hands and wrenched them from my eyes. Lehera knelt behind me, laughing. She was as real as the moon and the only sign she wasn’t just like me was that her hair was wet, dripping silver beads onto her breasts and thighs.

  I leaned forward and touched my lips to her forehead. Her skin was as warm and fresh as the day she’d died. I moved lower, kissing the water droplets from her body, and she arched her back and murmured in pleasure.

  Before I pushed her onto her back, I asked one question. Why?

  “I couldn’t bear to be separated from you, Marania. Not for a single night. So I asked the moon to let me join her and she took me.”

  I began to cry. All those wasted nights when Lehera and I could have been together!

  Now it was her turn to kiss the moisture from my face. “Don’t cry, my love. Don’t regret. We will always spend our nights together now.”

  Then I did ease her backwards, and held her down while my mouth devoured her body like a starving woman finding a perfect, ripe fruit on the forest floor.

  Her hair never dries. We spend each night together, on the moss by the pool or in the hammock I’ve swung between two trees, and every morning I awake alone, but my body is scented with the Tahitian gardenia’s heady perfume.

  Your honeymoon apartments are close to Lehera’s home, but it is one of the places considered sacred on Honeymoon Island and no guide will lead you there. Lehera and I will share one thing with you though. The garlands around your necks are Tahitian gardenia. At night, when we have loved and laughed enough, we weave them for you, so you will remember that no matter how long you are parted, your reunions will be like honeymoons – and to remind you also to always thank whatever gods you believe in, for giving you each other.

  Learner Driver

  My boyfriend Kevin dumped me two weeks before my driving test. Bad enough, but then I couldn’t use his car to take the test in. Dad knew somebody with the same make of car, and asked him if I could borrow it for the test. So this friend of Dad’s dropped it off at their house and I took my test, passed, and drove back to Mom and Dad’s, all shaky and chuffed to bits. Should have been the end of it. Really should have been the end of it. Thing is, Mom and Dad had gone out shopping, leaving this note saying ‘Please hang on till Jeff gets there, so you can give his keys back.’ It was Jeff’s car I’d borrowed. So when he turned up, rang the doorbell, I was expecting some old geezer in a cardigan. I opened the door and he was like Steve McQueen. And he knew it, did that whole look up and down thing with a half smile, like he understood what I was thinking. I said something half-witted and dropped the bloody keys on the mat.

  I bent to grab them and as I straightened up he put his hand out, like he was going to steady me, and put it straight on my left breast! Which was the moment for him to apologise – but he just grinned at me. And half of me was thinking ‘there’s no way you’re as old as my dad,’ and the other half thought ‘this would burn Kevin to a crisp, if he knew’ and the next thing was, I had my hands on his waistband (no elasticated jeans, thank God) and he was shoving me back down the hall until I hit the stairs. So I kissed him and he tasted really nice, and that was it, I never stood a chance once he’d got his thigh between my legs and I was snogging and wriggling around on him like a pole dancer. I didn’t even notice when he slipped his hands round my back and undid my bra. I suppose an older man has a lot more experience, smoother action, that kind of thing. But once he’d lowered his head to my nipples and was tonguing away I realised that this was going to have to go all the way, so I pushed
him away a bit and just laid myself down on the hall carpet, hitching up my best skirt which I’d worn to impress the examiner and he went down on me like he was famished, really going for it. And with the adrenaline of passing the test and the fear of Mom and Dad turning up any second, I came like an express, I really did.

  And I thought that was going to be the end of it, but I sat up and he was still grinning and I was blushing like a red light, so I reached forward and put my hand in his hair, which did have quite a lot of grey in it, I noticed, and pulled him down on top of me. When he slid inside me I sort of came round and thought ‘I’m screwing my dad’s mate in my parents’ hall at eleven o’clock on a Friday morning’ and so it wasn’t the most exciting sex in the world, to be honest, not right then, anyway.

  The thing is, he came and we straightened ourselves up and that was it. By the time Mom and Dad got back, I was sitting in the kitchen with a cup of tea. Ever since though, I’ve been thinking about what we did, every time I pass some bloke with fair greying hair, I feel myself getting hot, and I never go round to Mom and Dad’s until I’m absolutely sure there’s no chance of bumping into Jeff because I don’t trust myself around him, I really don’t.

  Say it with Aloes

  Vince saw the problem as he locked up for the night. A red light on the temperature control panel. He moved to the unit and laid his hand on the earth. It was chilly, so he pushed his forefinger gently between two of the tiny aloe vera plants. The soil was damp and cold. He twisted the thermostat but the heating coil didn’t respond. With a sigh, he grabbed his cell-phone, “Janice, I need you back here right now. The under-soil heater on the aloes cuttings has failed. It’s going to be below zero tonight and they’ll chill down really fast so you’ll have to come and move the trays while I try to solve the problem.”

  “Uh …,”

  “No excuses, Janice, you said you wanted to help raise plants for the burns unit, so I gave you a chance.” As he spoke Vince unplugged the unit with his free hand, juggling connections, trying to see what was wrong. The aloe plants were tiny stubs in the cold soil. Soon, each one would produce enough sap to heal the third degree burns of a child, or help reduce the inflammation and swelling around the sight of a major surgical wound, but only if the plantlets survived this cold night, which they wouldn’t without heat. “I mean it, Janice, whatever you had planned tonight, you’d better cancel and get your ass over here now, or plan to find yourself back working as a docent on the hospital desk.”

  She turned up exactly seventeen minutes later – he knew because he’d set the timer to see how long the aloes had gone without heat.. Vince was impressed at her speed, and that she’d had the foresight to pack a bag with a flashlight, flask of coffee, fruit and cookies. He didn’t let it show though. Janice had turned out to be a problem for him and he wasn’t sure how to solve it.

  It wasn’t that she was a bad worker—in fact she was tireless and smart. It wasn’t that they didn’t have a lot in common—like him, she was getting over a relationship gone bad, and they both loved plants and the challenge of greenhouse cultivation. It was that every time she walked down the garden he couldn’t stop himself focusing on the tight muscles of her ass. She didn’t sway, she strode, and those small globes rotated above her slim legs in a way that made him hard. He’d taken to wearing his pruning apron on the days she worked, just to hide his erection. And yet she didn’t seem the kind of woman who would notice anyway.

  They’d been working together for three months now, since she’d answered his advertisement for an employee who had experience in horticulture and medicine. He hadn’t expected to get many qualified replies and he’d been right to be pessimistic. The only candidate who had the necessary experience and intelligence was Janice, with her degree in herbal remedies. She’d recently moved to the area to get over her broken relationship, and was still looking around for a job to suit her. He’d hired her on the spot, but now he was beginning to regret it. There was something a bit chilly about her, he’d decided, just as there was about this damned bed of aloes.

  He stood back and watched her beginning to lift the smaller seed trays out of the broken unit. “Set them in the marigold raiser,” he said. “Swap them over. Marigolds are tough babies, they’ll cope with a hard night.”

  As he said ‘hard’ she bent over the unit, stretching forwards to reach the furthest tray of plants, which displayed her rear to him, accidentally revealing her panty-line cutting across her small buttocks. That, and the double meaning of hard, did it. His cock sprang up, and he couldn’t suppress a groan as his balls tightened pleasurably. Janice glanced over her shoulder. Even in the blue greenhouse lights, she couldn’t miss the curve of his shaft in his jeans. She brushed long black hair out of her eyes as if that might change what she was seeing.

  Vince shrugged. “What can I say? Anyway, this isn’t the time for social niceties… let’s get this job done.” He was damned if he’d apologize to her for a natural reaction. She should be glad he was ethical enough not to have grabbed her before now, but in any case the idea of boss/worker relationships made him antsy. How could he be sure she didn’t feel coerced, or simply want him for his money? Since he’d retired as a futures trader, to concentrate on horticulture and its medical implications, women had been around him like slugs scenting lettuce, but what they could scent was a millionaire in his forties.

  Well, it wasn’t exactly a millionaire moment right now, he thought, watching ice already beginning to form on the outside of the greenhouse windows. The sky was dark, with pinprick stars, showing that a heavy frost could be expected. What a night for one of his brand new heating units to stop working.

  He crawled under the unit, taking the flashlight with him. Once he was on his back he began to check the connectors and cables in case something had broken or shorted out. It was fiddly work, in the blue gloom, and it didn’t help that from there he had a superb view of Janice as she lifted trays, her small breasts jiggling above the spiky plantlets and her tight ass rolling as she moved away. The concrete floor was icy and his ass, pressed against it with nothing but the thin cotton of his underwear to protect him, was fast becoming an arctic zone. Maybe that would help get rid of his erection, although it didn’t seem to be working, because each time Janice came back to the table, he felt his shaft throb as she stood over him, her legs apart as she braced herself to lift the heavy trays. He sighed.

  Janice must have heard him, because when she came back, she crouched down, her hands resting on the bench above her head. It looked to him like she was cuffed, arms straight, breasts pushed forward and the image made him even harder. It made him furious to be so out of control and he knew too, that his hard-on was more obvious than ever. Janice seemed to be oblivious to the situation, as one of her hands descended with a cup of coffee. What an ice maiden. He hoped she hadn’t got too close to any of the aloe plants, she was so damn cold she could probably freeze them just by touching them.

  “Here,” she said. “You look cold.” He realized it was the first time she’d spoken since she arrived. Despite his irritation with himself and her, he had to admit it was another thing they had in common—they could work in companionable silence. In fact one of the great pleasures of having her as an assistant the past few months had been the discovery that, unlike almost every other women he’d met, she didn’t see the need to talk for the sake of it.

  He decided that it was time he showed some appreciation, after all, she’d given up her evening to come and rescue the aloe project, so he smiled at her as reached for the coffee, scooting forward his heels and behind, and as she swayed towards him, her hand jolted, spilling hot coffee on his thigh. “Shit!” he yelled.

  Janice grabbed a watering can and launched the contents at him, cooling the scalding coffee but leaving his jeans soaked with frigid water.

  He scrambled out from under the table, all friendly thoughts forgotten. “What the hell is wrong with y
ou tonight? Are you crazy? Jesus woman, you could have scalded me!”

  Janice simply shook her head, as though denying the charge, or telling him he was out of line. “You’d better take those off,” she said, “while I move the rest of the plants.” He looked at her but her face was straight. “Honestly, I don’t mind.” she said. “After all, I’m a grown woman, I’ve seen enough men in their underwear.”

  He shucked the jeans, glad he had substantial cotton boxers underneath. He thought about going back to the house for dry pants but decided he’d finish checking the connections first. It was a long way from the greenhouse, at the very bottom of his two acre garden, to his bedroom on the second floor of his split level ranch house. If he needed a new transformer from the store cupboard he could get it when he went back indoors.

  Janice tapped him on the shoulder and he turned, to find her holding out a single aloe vera leaf, about as long as his little finger, and mottled light and dark green. He blinked. “In case I did scald you,” she said. “That’s what we’re growing the plant for, after all.”

  He frowned, feeling stupid. She was right, he should have thought of the aloe’s healing power himself. As she watched, he squeezed the plant, seeing the clear aloe sap rise to the surface like pre-come and the phallic imagery made him hard again. He turned his back on Janice to rub the juice into his thigh. He didn’t see why he should expose his body’s lack of control to her. The skin was slightly pink where the coffee had landed, but the aloe sap immediately made it feel cooler and calmer. When he turned back, Janice took the empty leaf from him, and he watched her cross the greenhouse to dispose of it in a lidded bin. It must have been his imagination, but she seemed to strut at little, as though she was showing off her body. He rubbed his face hard with both hands. The woman was frigid, and clumsy too. He must be fatigued or something to be watching her this way when he’d already decided that he was going to have nothing to do with her.