by Clay, Josie
“Sshh” she said. “You can't travel like this”. Her hand on my stomach, emanating care.
“Oh no”. So wretched I began to cry. “I think I might poo myself”.
“Don't worry about it”. Placing a hand on my forehead. “Hot” she said. “Have you had this before?”
“Yeah, but not for years”.
“Are you sure about this?” She cracked open a can of Heineken and popped some pills from the blister pack.
“It's the only thing”. I raised myself on my elbow, slack-jawed. We watched in horror as my toes contorted crazily in cramp.
“It's like you're possessed” she gasped.
My tremoring stomach was deciding whether to keep the cocktail so I drank another beer – shit or bust.
“I've got blood on the blanket”.
“Doesn't matter”.
As one mindless beast gradually vacated my body, another, more malevolent one was waiting. I viewed us from the rafters; me, blood-smeared, cadaverous and Dale, kneeling next to my vile form. I witnessed the back of her head as she massaged my claws back to toes; how I loved the back of her head. But I'd imagined it and so it would happen, that familiar imp, salivating in anticipation, that hobgoblin, that Will-o-the-Wisp. He'd been with me all along. The realisation he was male had just come to me, not surprising. The word 'animus' came to mind.
“Better?” Dale said. I smiled weakly, regarding the empty beer cans and he made his move.
“Oh no”.
“What, baby?” She studied my stricken face. Struggling to keep him out, I clamped my hands over my ears and screwed my eyes shut, but he was already whispering his sibilant zephyr. '...look at her'.
I opened my eyes and saw the reality. Her beautiful face etched with concern.
“Minky, what is it?” She touched my shoulder and I shrugged her off, her hand lingering uncertainly before dropping to her lap.
'She loves you now' he said, 'but soon ...ouch! That's going to smart when she changes her mind, when she – 'can't do this anymore'. He dabbed speech marks in the air. It was true, one day she would go and if I kept investing at this rate then I would die. His loathsome fingers pushed the poppers up my back and drew a zip across my mouth, sealing me in a clammy gimp suit. My eyes, which had been those of a hostage fiercely inferring their predicament, rolled up in my head and returned catatonic.
“Minky, your face is empty”. I'd never heard Dale scared and the dark shape lifted my lips into a leer of satisfaction.
“I can't do this anymore” I heard myself say. Dale, trying to comprehend, cocked her head, eyes flaming with concentration.
“What do you mean?” she said, almost smiling herself.
“It's been fun” I said airily, “but let's call it a day”.
“I don't understand” she said, drawing her hand to her mouth.
“I'm not what you think I am” I sighed. “Best stop it now, eh?”
Her eyes flared a dangerous chrome warning that did nothing to stop me. “Better run to Pappa” I gloated.
Shaking her head, her sun-kissed curly shock danced in turmoil and her eyes, now indigo, sprung two perfect tears.
“Dale?”
“Yes?” she said hopefully, in a way that broke my heart.
('Unnecessary!' I implored the dark thing, but I had imagined it, so it would happen).
“Fuck off” I said.
And her eyes switched off, like two dead stars.
“Unbelievable” she said, getting to her feet, “unba-fucking-lievable”, slamming the boat house door.
Breathing a sigh of relief, I stood unsteadily. Well that's that. I washed myself in the sink and dressed, lining my gusset with a sanitary towel with the clever wings to augment the super plus tampon. Hoisting up seawater in the bucket, I sluiced the floor, stripped the bed where we'd slept for the last two weeks, packed my bag, omitting the green polka dot bikini, placing it on the chair. As I rinsed out the coffee mugs, I wondered what the hell I was doing. Sitting on the bed, my bag by my Blundstones, I looked to the sea where a windsurfer zipped across the triptych.
Imagining myself in a boat like Hulda, a safe little boat. I sat cross legged far from land, where no-one could see me, but soon there was a hole and as the water swirled in, I tried to plug it with my hand and bale with the other, but then a second hole and a third, until the water was around my waist, and Hulda's edges disappeared. Plus I'd forgotten how to swim and as the water closed over my head I shouted for Dale, my voice nothing but bubbles in silence.
A huge sob forcing the air from my lungs so completely I thought I might never inhale again, only one long exhalation from now on, expelling the fathoms.
The boats jostled, their knock concealing a softer, more persistent rap. The bed dipped beside me – Nils' khaki shorts and lightly furred legs. The clean white handkerchief flourished under my nose and a packet of Marlboro, like a magic trick. I took the hanky but declined the cigarette, which sparked into a plume of pleasant, wheaty poison, dispersing in slats of sun.
“Dale tells me you are unwell, I hope you are feeling better”.
The very mention of her name shamed my heart into a lopsided tattoo of love–loss, love-loss, love-loss.
“How is she?” I hiccupped.
“She is upset but mostly, she is worried about you”.
“I don't know what happened Nils, I'd never hurt her”. Burying my face in the hanky, he let me weep for a while before settling his heavy arm around my shoulders and inclining his head.
“I'm sure it will be alright” he said.
The possibility hadn't occurred to me and our blue gaze met.
“Do you think so?”
“Sure” he smiled. “We all have bumps in our roads, it cannot be a holiday always”.
“Oh please Nils, tell her I didn't mean it”.
“That is for you to do”, withdrawing his arm, creaking the floorboards to the doorway. “You know, Minky, we have a saying – eyes that do not cry are eyes that do not see”.
Trudging to the big house, I fantasised about stabbing myself in the throat. I found her in the bedroom, dry-eyed. I trembled before her in humility and longing.
“You must trust me” she said.
“I do trust you”, my tears unstoppable.
“Minky, you evidently don't”. Her voice warm, no hint of recrimination.
“I don't deserve you”.
“Mmm, there it is” she said. “Perhaps you should talk to somebody”.
The idea of spilling my guts to a stranger struck me as absurd and I told her so. “You could talk to me” she said.
The floor pitched and everything about me haywired. Only Dale remained still, like a lighthouse, her beam sweeping over me. I cast my eyes down to that black, barnacle encrusted casket on the sea bed, strapped with locks. And I slumped to the floor abruptly, no sea legs. She came and sat before me, her legs crooked over mine, our cocos together, her arms around me, just like our first night. I cried into her hair and told her. And she cried too, for the little girl I was and for the woman I'd become, the woman she loved.
On the plane, my freckled hand in her brown one.
Chapter 12
Prudence slinked against our ozone zipped bag (more excited at their arrival than ours), making that cat horror face as if she'd somehow visualised the sea. The wisteria coiled a sinister tendril between the sashes, reaching for the wind down lock as if it were on the rob. I thwarted it with a yank and its leaves tumbled into the sink.
Dale's flank against mine on the doorstep; sitting in a whisky moment, we surveyed the rampant brambles and puffy seed heads that constituted her garden.
“Hmm, neglected” she said.
An unseasoned robin recklessly chastised Prudence.
“Let me do it” I said, dampened inspiration rekindling.
“Can I help?” she said and then thought again. “Unless you want it to be your project”.
“No, let's do it together” I said. “Tillsammans”.
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Dale's rusty shears, seized and blunt, merely folding the stems as I clapped them at the brambles. Dale herself, in a furious tangle, plucking blackberries into a tupperware.
“Foffan” she grumbled, thorns raking her skin and catching her corkscrews.
The house perfumed with hot fecundity when I returned with a cache of shiny tools. Dale at the stove, stirring a sticky blackness, moist, in a loose, grey vest and cut down jeans, arms and legs lashed with inconsequential ruby welts, like Gulliver, stuck by the little people. My sex hormones swarmed a spawning coral.
“I've been thinking about you” she said. Bringing her wrist to my mouth, I sucked the ferrous wound, another on her shoulder and squatting, I cleaned a deeper scratch on her thigh, saliva mingling the melted beads. My fingers inching up, the tips finding the fabric of her pants. Dipping hers in the hot berry sauce, she painted my lips crimson and I sucked on the offering as she probed my teeth and tongue in rude rhythm. Withdrawing, she popped the buttons on her jeans and our fingers teased on opposite sides of the cotton, hers harvesting another sweet juice which she also fed to me. Stepping from her shorts, she lifted a Blundstone to the low shelf on the butcher's block and pulled the crotch of her pants to one side, displaying her black snatch and pink wet crescent, attar of roses and musk. The jam spluttered in travesty.
“Lick it”. She gazed down at me like the Milky Way. A few seconds passed before I revealed my canines.
“What, baby?” I said so she could feel the bang of the b’s.
“Please” she murmured, rocking closer, pubes tickling my lips. Squeezing her steeled buttocks, the crux unyielding, a whisper away. Drawing her apart with my thumbs, I studied the arrangement of flesh and petal in order to best answer her question. Putting forth my supposition artfully, working in logic and instinct, my tongue approaching the subject from all angles. I pointed out her G spot and she responded in a flood of silky prose, concurring wholeheartedly. Wrapping up, her voice rose impassioned, her conclusion clear and concise.
Then she lay on the kitchen table, bottom braced against boot heels.
“Fuck me” she said, provoking a further exchange so heated, that utensils jounced across the table and clattered to the floor. Her font arched up to better glean my knowledge, spitting my wisdom back at me, corrected and understood. “Let me see you” she said, scavenging my t-shirt over my head and kissing me scholarly, filling my mouth with her warm words.
We debated again, my hand hammering home my position while she wrestled with the concept of my shoulder, gripping and biting the mechanism.
“You're so...” she moaned, and then “Oh God, it's huge”, as if witnessing a colossal meteor breach the atmosphere. She fixed her mouth again to mine for safety, blowing and sucking, while I pumped her hot and quick, with a tender velocity. Hanging at the apogee, she bucked a backwash. “Yes!” she cried in triumph, wrapping me in her arms and legs so that I could share the race and rub of her.
“I'll just jar this up and then I want to fuck you” she said, stirring the sweet gore .
“I'm a spent force”.
“Nonsense”.
“But this won't get the baby boiled” I nodded to the garden.
“Minky, you must get your priorities right”. She had a point. Sex and jam should always take precedence.
Colours caused a riot of emotion; it had always been so, even words and numbers had a hue. When I was a child I thought everyone saw this. The children at school all tinted. Their names slabs of pigment as they sat in class and smears when they zipped about the playground.
Dale's red bandana, corralling her curls, sang with suggestion. So too the yellow handle of the mattock arcing above it as she attacked the roots of a diseased elder, the black bird's berries already washed and in the fridge.
She'd interrogated me closely on my condition during our hot bed week, when I'd mentioned that the name Dale was sky blue.
“Matthew” she shot at me. “Yellow” I replied. “Martin”. “Orange”. “Barbara”. “Also orange”. “David”. “Green”. “Elizabeth”. “Pink, but Liz is yellow and Eliza black”. “Sven”. “Blue”. “Fatima”. “Mustard”. “Nancy”. “Dark red”. “What about Minette?”. “White, off-white”. “Surely Minky's pink” she said.
“No, it doesn't work that way. It's sky blue ...like Dale”.
My back barking a furore as I shuffled to the loo the next morning. My hands unaccustomed to hard work, throbbed with thorns, the glassy burn of arthritis in my previously broken knuckles. Dale hobbled down the landing; she'd twatted her foot with the mattock, but the limp would be gone by lunchtime. Backlit by sun, her edges gilded, she stood in the bathroom doorway, hips almost losing pyjamas. On her front, a purple Marc Bolan, another of the curly clan, his pretty face distorted by breasts. Blinking, I took a mental snapshot.
Dale bit the teeth of the saw precisely over my pencil line; today we would construct the deck. Her arm drawing the tool back and forth, speeding up to long, even sweeps, which swelled her biceps and ripped my vitals. She followed my direction in a way, at once touching and sexy. She fetched while I measured, cut noggins, braced them with her knee and hammered them home. Laying the spirit level across the joists, she grunted with satisfaction, flicking the bubble. She passed me golden screws from her mouth and supported while I chased them in, twisting her tail to scoop out deep holes beyond the spade with her bare hands.
“Close your mouth” I said, as cement dust clouded our faces. She hurried with the leaky watering can, muscles a masterpiece. Plopping a stick in the cement, banishing voids, the wet squelch prompting an arched eyebrow. By mid-afternoon the carcass was complete and she stepped from joist to joist, marvelling at its integrity.
“We could build a house” she said.
The last of the three thousand or so screws were in by midday, the task expedited by economy of movement and breath-holding. Indulging my disorder because Dale was at work today, leaving me to count and beat the clock. The deck now finished, this afternoon I'd start the overarching pergola, half covered, half open, which would accommodate the wisteria and allow us to sit outside when it rained.
During an unwanted coffee, I sat at the kitchen table and examined myself for happiness. People who claimed to be happy were either lying, deluded, stupid or insane; at least this had been my conclusion. In some respects, happiness was like health - you only knew you'd had it when it failed. Unhappiness was far more tangible.
A residual Dale within and about me; her bowl and mug in the sink, in my fingers a nascent dreadlock tugged from her head last night after our shower, her dusty, red bandana, a post-it pad, numbers jotted in her good girl's hand and a doodle of what appeared to be a pretty horse with a perm. I couldn't deny all this made me happy. My ‘phone beeped.
'Aching for you, can I come home please? x'
'Hurry x'
“Do you need a hand?” I said, as she scurried between truck and back garden. The clang of tubular metal and the angry wince of an angle grinder from within a small gazebo she'd erected around her project. She’d decided to make something of the drum of a single minded concrete lawn roller discovered in the nettles. The garden, all but finished - daisies, goldenrod, yarrow, salvia, veronacastrum, oatgrass - the plants shouted their allegiance to me in the yellows and blues of an unintended Swedish flag.
Dale emerged from the tent slapping her chaps, indian and brave, the dust-mask on her forehead like a Cyclops with an eye problem.
“What are you doing?” I said, retrieving a confused ladybird from her hair.
“Wait and see” she said. “Better not hang the washing out – I'll be making dust”.
Placing her hands on my breastbone, “Now shoo”. A gentle push.
“You're so sexy” I growled.
“Minky” she groaned, “go and play in the house, Mummy's busy”.
The covers were off. I spied on her from the kitchen, circling the upended cylinder, mallet in one hand, chisel in the other, like a gladiator
, deciding on the blow of dispatch, heart or head.
Reclining on the deck, I'd enticed her with Pimms. The fine white bloom of a plum on her cheeks and arms, the bandana doing little to preserve her hair from an icing sugar dusting, giving her the appearance of a handsome older woman – a horny prospect. The sweat chased clean runnels down her chest, the silver star on a smudgy cloud.
“You're resonating” I said, “you're in the zone”. This was a state of total concentration and efficiency. A discussion we'd had previously when Dale noted my approach to building the deck, it was unnecessary to reiterate the link between creativity and sex and how they resided in the same room in the brain - bedfellows, so to speak.