Truth, Lies, Dreams
I half closed my eyes and a beautiful blonde woman who sat next to me on a rock wall by the beach reached over and gave me a delicate kiss. She had long wavy hair. Her lips parted slightly and I felt her tongue protrude to find mine.
I thought of her as a great kisser although she was slightly drunk from the event earlier.
Read moreThen the woman walked away and went to sit on a beach chair located in the center of the road, a rocky road that followed the beach side wall.
Another woman who I had seen earlier came over to the wall. She too had long wavy blonde hair but it was darker yellow in colour. She walked behind the wall, and stood behind me on the sand. This woman too reached over to kiss me, but because she came at me from above, I had to bend back my head. Her lower lip grazed my upper lip.
The second woman was also a great kisser. I felt the hairs of her upper lip tickle my chin. Her lip hair was more noticeable than upon first glance, they being of fine blonde wisp.
Then she too, walked away, and I got up to change in the gym that was located further along the sea side path.
The gym was open air and the changing area was communal. As I pondered how to change without revealing my body (I needed to hold my white towel around my waist), I looked back along the path only to see the second woman bawl out the first. She threw a glass of white wine at the first woman who held the hem of her white lacy dress up so that it caught the liquid in the dress.
‘Why’d you kiss him,’ the darker haired woman asked, then she yelled something about not respecting her husband.
I walked back down the path to where they were arguing. Siobhan stood to one side by the rock wall.
To the woman whose dress was drenched in wine, I said ‘You should tell your husband that you are a great kisser and that he should love for it and respect you more. That way you could kiss and you could have a better relationship together.’
Then Siobhan looked at me pointedly. ‘Well said,’ she said.
Doodle courtesy of letsdraw.it.
Siobhan and I stood in the center of the room and looked around. Behind us there was a woman in a yellow dress. She was a local, an Argentine, and when I looked back at her again, I saw that her pubic area was naked and was covered with thick black cotton balls that hid her vagina. The shape of that cotton ball hair was a little off from a regular isosceles triangle because the right side was slightly longer than the left.
Read moreThrough the door and along one side of the next room, up on bleacher steps, in a corner, sat two couples, one couple on the next step up from the other. The women were pressed against the wall by their men who sat facing them. The couples were naked, and obese, and their blanched flesh hung loose around them, while the man of each couple buried his head in the folds of flesh on the chest of his partner.
(At first I thought the two people against the wall were women but so obese they were I could not be sure – fat pasty white skin dripped from all four people and disguised the shape of each person’s sex.)
When the man on the top step pulled away from his mate I saw a necklace with a thin gold strap and green pendant hung around her neck. He must have been sucking on the pendant, I thought.
Of course Siobhan wasn’t having any of this.
She wandered off into the next room and I would follow soon after. The woman in the yellow dress, would follow with me. I learnt that her name was Alice.
It became clear to me that we should indulge these locals, pay them a few pesos but with Siobhan around, payment would be unlikely. I lost track of her after the next room and had to use the locator app on my iPhone to find out where she’d gone.
The next area was outdoors, but it seemed that Siobhan had disappeared to the main enclosure where there lay a circle of prehistoric stones. I hurried through to find her but was sidetracked once more by a room off to one side, where there were gathered more prostitutes.
As I walked in I thought that we should be offering money to them too, for their nakedness.
This time I wanted to broach one of the women. I walked along the corridor, and it was lined with bamboo walls and bamboo benches on either side. Couples sat on the benches and wrapped their arms around each others’ naked bodies – men indulging in local women this time, for sure.
I returned to the main room and stepped into the enclosure where the stone circle lay, but Siobhan had already moved along. I hurried under a stone arch at the far end of the enclosure, and went through to the next area, where there were trees covered with black monkeys who sat on the branches and looked mischievously down at me.
At first I wondered whether to put away my phone in case the monkeys would steal it, but instead I took a picture.
To one side of a tree was Siobhan, in a grove to the left of the entrance. She was surrounded by the monkeys. I raised my camera and took a picture which perfectly framed her, and the monkeys around her, and the tree with its snaking branches.
As I turned away from Siobhan, she cried out, “Take a picture of me!”
“I already did.” I replied. “A perfect one.”
Picture by Modigliani uploaded by Benoît Prieur to WikiMedia Commons.
It was my last day in Hong Kong and I hadn’t had the chance to say goodbye to Dee.
We’d only met up once during my visit and I was doing my final walk back up the shoreline path in Lamma. Lamma, with its narrow paths and hustling stalls on either side.
Read moreHopefully I would see Dee on my way.
People, many people were pushing past me as I climbed the path. I knew not where else to go, though I knew that Dee’s house was somewhere off to the right at the end of the path, somewhere after the path split into two.
At the fork, the right turn followed the shore, the left went into the forest, but I reckoned I’d have to turn around before then, to head back to the pier. Any later and I would miss the ferry back to Central.
Further down the path I’d left one of the restaurants and was pushing past people up the hill when, as luck would have it, I saw Dee coming down towards me. She was with a girl.
Dee saw me as she approached. She was wearing a formal pale green frock with pleated skirt. Her hair was short bob blonde.
Once she was near I spoke, “I’m leaving Hong Kong today.”
Her friend carried on down the path to give us some space to talk.
“Oh,” Dee replied, and we hugged.
Her skin was pale, her shoulders rounded and plumper than I remembered, against the pale green straps of the dress.
We embraced and my face was close to her ear. I wanted to say, “I love you,” but her friend was still in earshot and I was afraid.
I thought I would say it just as we were parting, but before I could spit it out, suddenly Dee said goodbye and turned away.
Instead I continued up the hill, following the line of the shore, knowing that I’d missed the chance and that it was gone forever unless I double backed and caught up with her; unless I caught up to wherever she was going.
I was still kicking myself as I approached the fork.
The stalls either side of the path had thinned out.
A couple of lads were walking towards me and one of them made a joke about the other. I caught the joke and tittered as I passed them, and then the first one, the joker, said, “You think that’s funny?”
“No,” I replied, even though I thought it was. Yes, I’d got the joke even though I hoped he hadn’t realized it.
His friend squared up to me and began to push me, and so did the joker. So I pushed the friend backwards until he stumbled and fell hard onto the path.
The joker was harder to deal with, and only when I pushed him against the low cut wall that separated the shore from the path did he fall. He fell over the wall onto the pebbly beach below, and when I looked over the wall to make sure he was OK, all I could see was that he was riled up.
The joker stormed back up the stairs to the path and squared up to me again.
His friend was still lying groggy on the path.
This time I used the joker’s momentum. He ran at me and instead of pushing him away I deflected his force and projected him over the wall good and proper.
By this time the joker’s friend was coming to – just as the joker fell head first over the wall. The joker’s arms and legs were splayed apart as he landed.
I wasn’t afraid of his friend – instead his friend looked over the wall at the joker with me, but the joker looked like he was out cold this time. He looked unlikely to get up any time soon.
Photo by Judy Gallagher via Flickr.
It is a thin man, a DJ, who shows Leif and his escort onto a thin embroidered grey carpet that follows the length of the tent across the grey sand.
Read moreLeif and his escort walk along the carpet, her arm hooked under his, to the entrance at the near side end of the tent. His escort is demure, her dark Thai eyes turned down to avoid my look. She wears a tight silver skirt and she holds by his side until they reach the entrance, where the DJ parts the curtain to show them to their table.
Each table is long, it fills the length of each tent, and each tent is dedicated to an individual party. Leif and the Thai woman are invited through their entrance.
A gold ornament shaped like a netted leaf provides privacy from the rest of the table. I’m not clear what the other end of the table is for when only a couple are sitting at it. Maybe it is a place to put the courses that follow the usual Harira starter.
The tents are lined up in rows, our tent next to Leif’s, and we wait at our entrance for the DJ, for our escort.
Once Leif and his escort is settled, our own escort shows up at the far end of our own tent, at the beginning of the runner. She too looks Thai, but she is old and her brown thinning hair is plastered across her forehead. She smiles at me in greeting, but her teeth are also brown and she is missing two of her top teeth; only three of her teeth, on the right side of her mouth, remain.
At first I think she may be OK, and though we make not be able to communicate, that too may be OK.
But then, “This will not do!” I tell the DJ.
I think I am with Siobhan, I cannot tell, but we will complain, I think.
We enter the tent, leaving the DJ behind with the old Thai woman, and we push past our table and past the gold leaf ornament, until we we find a back room that must belong to the manager.
On the wall are rare framed pictures of gold and platinum LPs. The wall is maroon and shielded top to bottom by a thin glass wall which protects the mementoes behind it. There is a brown electric guitar, a Stratocaster I notice, behind the glass.
Guitars are propped on stands in front of the manager’s desk and, of course the desk is big and mahogany in the dim lit tent, but the manager is not there.
“This will not do!” I repeat, and I push on the glass wall. I am not sure whether I am trying to break it, but when it cracks unexpectedly, I want to go for it, we want to go for it. I kick at the glass wall, then I take one of the guitars from its stand and wield it at the glass to shatter it.
The whole glass wall falls towards us, and with it, the gold and platinum LPs, and the encased Stratocaster. They fall altogether, towards the desk and the glass smashes satisfactorily into splintered pieces, and spreads around us, across the carpet.
Photo from our trip to Morocco, April 2024.
We are going to a party at Siobhan’s friend’s apartment on the south side of the Embankment and are taking the train. So we get on at the Angel and take the lift, an old wooden box, down into the Underground.
Read moreThe platforms we walk through are dark and grimy, brown muddied walls and hidden tunnels, and the service is running slow.
We wait on Platform 2 of the Central line, it seems like for an age, before a train finally arrives, but when it comes to a stop it is already full, people crushed together, all the way up to the ceiling.
The bodies are pressed flat against the glass and there is no way we are getting on. We will wait for the next one.
The next train is a flat bed, cargo only, with a thick plain white rectangular box which covers the deck. It speeds through the tunnel, and we continue to wait.
And the next train will be a passenger train but it will be a long time coming. We wait in anticipation but by the time it arrives the train is ill-lit from the inside and it speeds through the tunnel and disappears the other side without stopping.
It seems we’ll never get there.
“We’ll take the Circle or the District line,” I suggest. Only you have to exit the station and cross the road to the other side of the roundabout to get to the platform.
So we leave, ascending once more with the lift and cross over to the entrance of the Circle and District.
“We can take either line,” I say as we enter down into a dark corridor, intersecting rail line tracks to our left, cavernous walls dark and dripping with sweat. We have to hurry as the District line carriages clank across the lines and past us, towards their stop.
But when we arrive at the platform the problem is the same; though at the start, there were only a few passengers waiting, the crowd begins to pile up. People in dark clothing, faces barely discernible.
“We are meeting at The Kestrel,” says Siobhan. She means Reed’s place.
“But that is nowhere near the Embankment,” I say. “That is in Hammersmith.” I pull out a piece of paper to work out the directions, but it is too small to write on.
“I need something bigger,” and I turn back to her. “Have you got something?”
But Siobhan is distracted, she doesn’t reply and I have to repeat it. And only then does she pull out a larger piece of paper, the size of my hand, that I can use.
“We should go back to the Central line,” I continue. I am getting frustrated that we wasted all this time waiting for the wrong train.
We are exiting the station, onto the road that leads away from both stations, when I suggest we can take an Uber. The greying light of dusk is in the distance.
“Why didn’t you suggest that in the first place?” she says, spitting the words at me, but it was her who got us lost in the first place.
“I’m not going,” I respond, “I’ve had it!”
And I walk away, to the right of me a chain link fence, a construction site behind the fence, both stations further behind me.
“I’m not going,” I reiterate. I walk slowly.
And she follows me, she too is going the wrong way.
But this is it. Where we will really part.
I circle even slower back round the roundabout, time and fear crawls, me slightly ahead of her, until we are back on the Angel side.
I am practically at a stop when Siobhan comes up alongside, to my left. She has thick pale blonde hair and a slightly pudgy face, thick lips like Becky Farmer, unvarnished, and she is attractive at that very moment; it is eating me up.
“I want to fly around naked,” she says and she smiles.
We cannot do it. Part. I don’t want to.
“Will you do that for me?” I ask her. And then I kiss her full on the lips.
Photo via Wallpaper Flare
