‘Help,’ Siobhan cries out.
The mattress shakes with the kick of her legs.
‘Get away. Get away… Help.’
Silence.
Photo by Tom Waterhouse via Flickr.
Big Bad Man
Jwee is having a Baby
Jwee and I are lying naked in a white room, our limbs enfolded. There is a soft pale lighting emanating from the window. On Jwee’s right arm is a line tattoo of two overlapping crosses, one cross red and upside down next to the black one.
Read moreAs we caress each other I write this sentence down using a large ivory-coloured ballpoint pen. The tip of my pen is the size of a roller ball deodorant but the words come out clearly in black ink on the page, though the sentences are written in a disconnected form, written wherever there is space on a parchment which I have placed along the arm of our chaise long.
No matter, because as a whole the sentences will paint the full picture.
Jwee looks up at me, her perfect tan round face in mine. Her beautiful smile with her trademark blue wire rim braces is more radiant than ever.
‘I will have the baby,’ she says. She is talking about Zach’s baby. This Zach is not Leif’s son as introduced in previous dreams. This new Zach is Jwee’s unfaithful and crotchety Western lover living in Bangkok.
I’d first met Jwee next to Twister’s in Nana Plaza six months ago. In that encounter Jwee told me that she wanted a second child, a sibling for her eleven year old daughter, but being already thirty six meant that her biological clock placed her on borrowed time. I tried to remain positive.
(One day, dear reader, I will publish the full story of beautiful Jwee, but for now the story will remain hidden on the other side of my parchment, waiting for the sequel to Flying with the Cormorants.)
‘You mean in England?’ I ask her.
‘Yes.’
It means that Jwee will come to England to have the baby, and Jwee and I will be able to carry on our affair after it is born. I can barely contain my joy. I hope that it means she will move from Thailand permanently, or that at least, we can spend a lot more time together while she’s in England.
We lie together in a cool jasmine shade, still and in silence, on the chaise long. Presumably the baby is Zach’s, not mine, but no matter.
Down the left side of the elongated parchment I write the next scene.
Jwee and I stand together waiting to board the airport people mover. Jwee is behind me. She’s wearing her white thigh length boots with her long wool grey dress. To my right is Zach and another bargirl who stands in front of him. To the right of them is a third couple waiting to get on.
We are waiting for the train doors to open, so that we can climb aboard. The doors are solid iron and painted a uniform beige.
Jwee takes my arm and swings my hand in hers. Her fingers feel soft and tender in mine. Zach does not seem to mind that I am pairing with Jwee, after all he has another woman for the night. He doesn’t know about Jwee and I. He doesn’t know that when Jwee comes to have the baby, Jwee and I will continue to have our affair.
I hope this dream means that Jwee is truly pregnant as she wanted.
Photo by Mark Fischer via Flickr.
Paradise by Plane
We are on a huge military cargo plane going back to the UK when, through the opening in the back where the hatch opens out for the parachute soldiers to jump, I see a beautiful ocean view, with sparkling blue waters and a whale bouncing in an and out the water parallel to a coastline.
Read moreI am not usually excited by whale sightings, but this whale continues jumping in and out of the water, and even though it is far down below us, the sparkling water and the sandy coast make for a paradise.
‘Look, a whale!’ I cry out to my fellow passengers.
As the planes rumbles on it appears to descend and the view becomes clearer.
‘Maybe they are dolphins,’ I declare, and sure enough, there are schools of them bouncing in and out of the sparkling waters, swimming north up the coast line, and coming nearer into view as the plane descends,.
Our plane comes to land at an idyllic outcrop – an unexpected break point in our return flight. We file out and walk along a narrow path along a sandy road, with beachfront restaurants to our left, and shop-seller stalls to our right. The place seems foreign to what I have seen before but magical too. Maybe it is Moslem or Caribbean, I cannot tell from the coloured stripes and robes of the shopkeepers.
‘What is this place?’ I ask a tourist in a white bucket hat sitting in a restaurant to my left.
‘I don’t know,’ he says, and I think, How can you not know?! You’re here, aren’t you?
I continue on, and stop at a stall to ask the proprietor. ‘What country am I in?’ I ask.
The woman replies, ‘We’re in Africa.’ But Africa is a continent, I think.
Then I reach down to a small black girl by the woman’s side and ask again, ‘Where are we?’
The girl looks up and says to me, ‘You are in Ecuador,’ and I think how marvellous.
I must tell Siobhan that we have to go to Ecuador proper, and not just for a stopover. Never mind if Quito is high up in altitude, it will surely be good for her if we only stay for a short time.
Then the airline stewards lead us to our restaurant which is on an island off the sandy coast. We step into the water until we are up to our necks, and I pull out my iPhone so it won’t get wet. I lift the phone above my head but too late, I have to shake the water off it.
The phone will be alright, I think. I’ll take it back to the airplane and leave it there, because I don’t need it while we are here, in paradise, on this island.
Photo by Pauchok via GoodFon.com.
Back in Love with Sophie Priest
Sophie Priest was from the Home Counties but when I first met her she was working as a librarian for John Lewis on Oxford Street. I had no idea why a department store would have need of a librarian but no matter.
As I described in my Asian stories, Sophie had a black centre-parted fringe which framed an angelic face dotted with light brown freckles under hazel eyes and I loved her, even though she did not believe it.
Read moreSophie was now living in a flat share near the house on Brookfield Avenue where Elaine and I grew up. I was back with Sophie on a trial basis and I still loved her so I was on my best behaviour. (Sophie had been cut from the Asian stories for reasons of expediency though her description had been retained and attributed to Bertie.)
That day I had to clear out my work place before going back to Sophie’s flat. Evening was already settling in and I was the only one in the office after Duc the Wanker (not to be confused with Duc the Blind Rickshaw Driver) had left.
From the window of our shared office on the second floor, I looked out across the housing estate rooftops with their burnishing remnants of sun, and called Sophie to warn her.
‘I’m going to be later than I thought,’ I told her with some trepidation. ‘Maybe seven o’clock?’ I added.
We were going to have dinner together. I pictured her picking up my call and leaning against the side table in the foyer corridor of her flat. Sophie would be wearing a white top and jeans, not the tight black wool skirt of old. Also her hair was brown now. She’d dyed it, and it was slightly wavy, not straight, and she no longer had her bangs.
I preferred her old hair colour but as stated, I loved her anyway and wanted to make it up to her.
‘That’s fine,’ I heard her say from the the other end of the line. Then I put down the receiver and hurried out of the office to my car.
Traffic was heavy as usual along the M40, right up until the Hangar Lane Gyratory but the most annoying part was the final walk to her house. Sophie lived the same side as our old house but to get to her flat you had to walk up Hangar Lane to the top of the hill, then turn right into the estate, then walk back down again to her flat. There was no cut through from what I could see, and by the time I had parked and begun the walk it was already night.
I walked up the hill past the shops on the corner, along the tree-lined sidewalk and past the chain link fence of an ill-lit car dealership. A man was walking out from the dealership entrance and for a moment I thought he must have found a cut through – unless the other end of the dealership had another chain link fence.
I continued up the hill past an opening where large brown boulders interrupted the tree line. Perhaps there was a cut through there instead? If I climbed over the boulders? But I was already near the top of the hill so I kept moving. For some unknown reason I crossed Hangar Lane at the zebra crossing and when I saw the commuters spill from the tube station I caught up with a woman to ask her about the cut through.
‘Not that I know of,’ she breathlessly responded as she hurried into the station. As I followed her in, I wondered whether I should have entered the estate from the north, instead of walking south up the hill. It would have taken me past my old house, but that was fine.
I already had a tube pass so I pushed past the ticket booth and didn’t even wait for the elevator but took the stairs instead. The walls were still the brown and white tile of the 70s because the station hadn’t been refurbished like the others. And when I got to the platform I was disoriented and unsure whether I was standing on the eastbound line or the westbound. In the other tunnel across from the platform where I stood I heard the rumble of a train as it came to a stop.
Did I want that platform instead of this? I wondered.
‘Ealing Broadway! doors closing,’ I heard the announcer call out.
Damn it, and I hurried across the intersection to the other platform, which was slightly elevated from where I had been standing. Two men were helping to lift a disabled woman in a wheelchair onto the train by smoothing down a black rubber mat in front of the doors.
Would the doors close before I too could get on? Just then the men stepped back and I slid in next to the wheelchair and the doors closed. At the far end of the darkened carriage was a light marked ‘Ealing Broadway,’ and with relief I leant back against the standing rests at the front of the carriage.
I looked down, and in my hurry, I saw that my phone had pushed out a little from my front pocket. It could have dropped to the floor. I pushed it back into my pocket and now it was okay. Now everything was okay.
Her Mouth Contorted With Rage
It started when Siobhan became annoyed with my attempts to help her on her computer.
She gritted her teeth in an ugly way that I had not seen before, her mouth contorted in a rectangle and her cheeks sinewed with anger, and she spat at me that she didn’t want my help. I was taken aback by her fierce expression and it made think to stop so I left and mumbled something loud enough for her to hear that she was being rude.
Read moreI left the house, and as I was leaving she suggested I go to the zoo.
The zoo was in Wimbledon but I went anyway and, as a peace offering, I thought to bring back pizza after my visit.
I was sitting on the train headed for the zoo when I realised how far I was from home; and it became clear that any pizza I would pick up at the zoo would be cold by the time I brought back the pies.
Upon my arrival at the zoo, I stood in the entrance hall. Through the doorway I could see the animals playing. I asked the door keeper if I could just order pizza now instead of going in.
‘It’s not usual,’ he said. But then he said it was ok and I called Siobhan to say that I would bring back pizza but it would take forty-five minutes to get back after it was delivered to the zoo.
‘Perhaps it’s better I pick it up in Ealing.’ I offered. ‘That way it won’t be cold.’
She got annoyed at my remark and snapped at me not to bother so I left the zoo without ordering pizza. I walked along a pavement alongside of the road that led away from the zoo then I turned left onto another street where there lay a large open green space on the opposite side of the road.
I passed by a woman in a white fur coat sitting on a bench.
The sun was already setting.
The woman’s coat looked like it came from a thrift shop. The woman had long black hair that was a bit natty and she seemed upset. I sat down on the bench next to her. For some reason I thought she was Russian. The woman lay her head on my shoulder and I asked her what was the matter. Then she turned to me and we kissed softly although she was much younger than me, being perhaps in her twenties.
Then two Indian men came by and started to argue with the woman. They were about her age, shorter than me and a little stinky. They wore shades. They told the woman to come with them and she stood up to leave.
As the woman walked away I saw that she left some keys on the bench. I got up to hand them to her just as she was leaving although it occurred to me that she’d left them intentionally. But the woman span round as she walked away and indicated that there was a phone there too. So I sat back down on the bench, and sure enough, tucked behind a white seat cushion was a pink older model smartphone.
I started typing on the phone and the keys did not work well but still I got the words out that she would be ok. I don’t know why I wrote that. After I’d finished typing the two Indian men came back, and this time they had a third man with them, the same age as them.
They saw me with the phone. One of them snagged the white cable attached to the phone and tried to pull it away from me. At first I held on but then I figured I didn’t need the cable so I let it go and the cable came loose from the phone.
I followed the men to a house where I figured I could take them on, for all three of them looked stocky and unfit.
They stood together in a dark hall that led to a wooden barn and despite the darkness of the hallway the first two still wore their shades. Only the third man did not wear shades because he wore regular glasses.
The three of them crowded around me so I tried to push the the third man’s glasses off his head. Even though they were close they still did not seem threatening so I swiped again at the man with the glasses. And with each attempt to knock the glasses off his head he ducked just enough that I would miss. So I tried again, this time aiming to get two of the men with one swipe.
Then I tried again. Then I tried again.
Photo by Isabelle Carin via Pexels.