Chapter four
Slowly the mechanical sound of the street outside began to whisper to the consciousness, coaxing it back from the furthest reaches of a sleep like death.
Finding ourselves entangled like the double helix of life, our bodies reluctant to part slid against each other like lazy magnets. Genital honey smells merged in the nostrils and struck at the back of the throat. We were awake....
We’d had finally fell to sleep at first light -- watching its grey threads snake gently through the windows, slowly burning out the shadows of my room. Now the autumn sun was high and shining through the barrel of a gun.
Once more I ran my hands over the silken sabre curves of Astrid’s entwining form, causing the organ in my head to bristle with images of the night's magic hours.
Suddenly, and I mean suddenly, she violently came to life, breaking the bonds of my arms, rolling on top of me, and with surprising strength pinning me down. Looking into my eyes she said,
‘Rig, you’re a sex maniac!’
‘It takes two to tango my little fever frau!’ I parried laughing.
‘How’s your head?’ she asked
‘No idea!’
Smiling so beautifully she said,
‘That’s bad -- that means you’re not going to understand when I say, breakfast or hungry -- aren't’t they great ideas?’
‘Ho, I understand hunger my dear’, I said trying a mock escape.
‘You wolf!’ she shouted, ‘you wolf!’
We laughed together – she released my arms, and kissed my sore mouth. She held on to me like a drowning sailor for a long time.
‘Do you have something to do today,’ she asked
‘No’, I said, then remembered Ralph and his marijuana harvest. Without using names I told her the whole deal, and described my visit to his place. She laughed like a loop throughout the whole story
‘Rig.... Rig.... it’s so typical of you.... you’re such a Bohemian heart’. Between her peels of laughter she said, ‘You seem to have a love of strange angles and fog’, and then she added, ‘but I really love it!’
So, I told her I would go to Ralph’s later and that I was free all day. I asked what she must do, and what about Detlef. Before she had a chance to answer I suggested we go out for breakfast. ‘No,’ she said, Detlef was no problem -- she was free all day. Then she sprang from the bed saying she could eat an albatross, and she would take the first shower, and could she use my toothbrush.
I remained lying on the bed turning things over in my mind. Feeling somehow more intensely myself -- stimulated by the sensuality – tossed madly by waves of emotion on a sense-sea. I thought of Astrid, and I thought of the night before, I thought of Detlef, I thought of my last affair, and the pain of loss when it was over. And all this was stuck in the revolving doors of my mind – going around and around. Astrid, the night before, Detlef, and my ex ....
*****
We stepped out arm in arm into a candy-chill air, under a skinned sun crossing a periwinkle blue water sky that threatened to tip on top of us.
Joking -- escaping into the freedom of laughter, we strolled along the Kasteinian Ally beneath its impressive, sun-fired, golden metallic chestnut trees. My head seemed to float like a balloon, buoyant on the tide of my heightened delicious feelings. The birds were hysterical – what is it with birds?
Like wolves we ate a breakfast of cheese, salami, and hot bagels while looking out of the large windows of the Schwarz Sour. When I looked at her I couldn't’t stop trying to penetrate her brown hypnotic eyes, to read her mind. What was she thinking? What, if anything, had last night meant to her? Had it been no more than a spontaneous, inebriated lust-whim? And what did I want? Here I am, a man arriving at my middle years without a lasting love relationship. I’ve seen a lot of weather.
That pessimist Aeschylus said: ‘who acts undertakes to suffer.` Well, acted I have.... And now this morning – this new morning – she has somehow made my whole being ache for her. She seems to have entered all the nooks and coigns of my thoughts. But she’s Detlefs wife, I argued inwardly. It would be foolish to presume that she could want.... but then, it would be foolish to presume she couldn't’t. I could have just asked her what the night before was all about. I decided not to. I thought I just go with it. But I mustn’t let it zigzag me. And at least for today the gods are with me.
We took advantage of the sunshine -- strolling up the hill in the Mauer Park, along what’s left of that infamous, ridiculous wall, which the kids make much better use of with their great imagination and colour spray-cans.
She talked of her job and how boring it was. She said she just didn't’t have the mentality for it, or for the people she worked with. ‘It makes you want to leap at the walls.’
‘When you do something which is so shallow it automatically corrupts you, because your motives have no value.’ She would rather do something imaginative -- ‘like these kids’. She remembered how free she had felt when she was studying graphics in Cologne -- not realising then how few interesting jobs were available, and how many soul destroying jobs she would finish up doing, even as a freelance.
We sat on a bench while she smoked a cigarette and told me how as a child she had spent all her holidays in England with her parents and her younger brother.
Her father had been studying Languages in England when the War broke out. He hated the Nazis, and so rather than go home he had gone to Switzerland, were he continued his studies, and met and married her mother.
His stay in England had made him a complete Anglophile, and he had hoped to return after the war. But after going back home his heart had gone out to the suffering of the people. He had wanted to help, so he took a job at the Cologne University, and he and her mother had done all kinds of voluntary work.
So when they, the children, were growing up every holiday was a chance for him to visit his sib home on the island. There were friends to visit, theatre, and museums in London, poetry in the Lake District, etc. Her father had loved all things English.
‘Even the food’ I asked.
‘Yes, even the Food’, she laughed – her words spun from her lips in little absorbing orbits. ‘Crumpets, English breakfast, buttered scones, and even kippers for breakfast in Scotland....’
As a teenager these visits had become ever more exciting. Her brother George, who she had always been so close to, had even married her best friend who lived in Kent, but they now lived in the South of France with ‘a mob of kids’.
I asked something about Detlef – something about how they had met, but she slipped into another subject so elegantly that there was no trace of a join. I was captivated and absorbed in her presence. I had never see this side of her. She had me wrapped around her long white delicate fingers. I didn't’t want to be just another of her fuck affairs!
I’ve always thought being in love is like going to sea. It’s wonderful when you have the wind in your sails and the sun is shinning – plain sailing – invigorating. But being an old sailor, I know the power of the storms that can blow up and sweep you off course, the dangers of a leaky boat, the doldrums, the dreaded shipwreck, which could leave you swimming for your dear life, or clinging desperately to anything that floats to keep from drowning. But in the end one must decide to set sail or not. For me, to stay in port is a coward’s option – for we surely were born to sail. We are more able in life when we love. And I want to be washed away by the waves of that feeling. Only tenderness seems to sooths the pain of being human, and tenderness shows we understand the other. And love takes us beyond the borders of the self, and into that other. I want no more from a woman than for her to be her self. And Astrid is a woman in every place. Yet, there is something in her, which is more than a woman. So let me take my chance even if I run aground between her thighs!
We stood and kissed for a while -- kisses that penetrated and plunged into me. Arm in arm we strolled slowly back to my place, and made love again. Magic! It was magic! In a haze of crazy intense oxygen we spun and hurled through obits like out of control satellites, raked towards a sucking core of which we ached to be a part.
Later we lay so close like Siamese twins joined at the groin. While she dosed I wept silently. Those tears… what were they? For joy? From the closeness? I really don’t know -- they are a mystery to me. Maybe because I was realising I would have to give the whole of myself to love her. Tears of loss of self? Was that it?
Reluctantly I untangled myself to go to the toilet. When I returned she was sleeping deeply -- looking so peaceful. I didn't’t want to disturb her. I sat watching her in her still white sleep -- my thoughts lapping gently on the shore of my consciousness.
Then suddenly memories of my ex came to me like a pale death song, which fractured the space and thronged through me. Once again I ran the gauntlet of those memories. Just thinking about her makes me feel the glue giving in the joints of my mind. The golden girl in her cat clothes – the liar-bird that came to roost – who sang such pretty melodies -- irresistible pretty melodies like nets of light that catch you. A sleek golden panther with eyes that could set your hair on fire – eyes like blue-green lagoons with the gold alchemists rings set in them. By sleight of high she had sold me Christmas -- an idiot’s tale. Her sincerity seemed to have the possibility of a wonder. I simply sailed into her bottle. She told me, we, two as one would skip down the primrose path of dalliance and pass through the Gate of Horn to that punctual spot. Hallelujah! Praise be! And there she would lay for me a golden love-egg – nail me up if I should lie. Yes, she could whisper like champagne, but it was all gas and bubbles.
The first time we met she had opened her long, long legs, and exposed her eye eating flesh all the way up to a thin black line. Behind which, lay an irrepressible promise. My eyes looked like knots in wood. Was it the bells or my brains that rang?
We made love like cats, dogs, rabbits, snakes, fish, crabs, worms, and insects. We fucked, jigged, sucked, licked, bit, probed and prodded endlessly. Soaked in the juices of lust we burnt up every bed we laid in. I felt like a mad gynaecologist – Dr. Penis Erectus on a seven-month deep fuckology course.
But she was a witch with an invisible cloak. And her bite, with poison fangs, went straight through to my soul. She trawled up my seabed – fifty leagues under the sea dredging my very being. She drank my very essence down into her stomach, and later at home she vomited me up into demijohns to keep forever with all her other samples on her specimen shelve.
And then? And then suddenly there was a strange, loud, hollow, deafening bang.... And then? And then nothing.... silence.... a full silence like the pause in music. And then? And then against the emptiest of skies a small cloud of black nightingale feathers floated slow and soft as snowflakes down to earth.
She had simply junked me -- scrammed – vanished into telephones and answering machines. There was only her voice with a Cheshire cat grin to it fading into the flux-virtual. She could have been anywhere.... she could have been talking to me on her cell-phone in the middle of the Sahara Desert, lounging by some oasis with some other poor sucker, sipping a cocktail while telling me she would pop around later.
And then? And then mauled, molested, and mashed I metamorphosed into Christ know what... into Kafka’s beetle... running wired to a blabbing radio in my head – no way back -- a loop within a loop within a loop – repeating itself, like being permanently in the last episode of Lost In Space.
And then? And then I stood naked and raw as mincemeat in the abyss of a dead dream -- my heart of darkness.
And then? And then my life was like a non-laughing joke barking up all the wrong trees and scaring the birds.Life’s sliding smile was only a signal of its meaninglessness -- a naked emptiness -- an atmosphere that both ripped and crushed my brain with a pain which seeks you in your very tissues.
And then? And then with my crippled ego, maimed by a sickening melancholy I was simply flurrying – nothing more -- going around with my head in a black bag, spitting out curses like blood, the wind whistling through my rectum, my brain-egg about to hatch – cuckoo! cuckoo!
And then? And then enough – more than enough, and then NOW! The clock strikes NOW! And it’s always NOW! I put my hand to my ear and listen to my inner monologues – what am I saying? Do I mumble? Do I bleat? Stop! Oh just stop....
****
It was six o’clock when I swung round to Ralph’s place. The night like a black hen was gently settling down on the city. After throwing several bolts on the door Ralph let me in, then quickly replaced them behind me. Again tea was awaiting me, and Sargent Sunshine had one of his space-spiffs stuck in his face
We sat at the kitchen table, he in his ridiculous little uniform. He closed his open laptop, and gave me that paper smile of his. He told me he had been working all day yesterday and today in one of his secret gardens, cutting down and trimming the plants till it was dark, and safe enough to hike some of them back to his car. He carries the stuff in airtight plastic milk canisters, so his car doesn’t stink of the stuff. And what could look more normal than milk canisters in the countryside?
After drinking the tea we ducked through the little door – through the looking glass, into his funny factory where a landscape of green hills towered, and the overpowering reek of dragon fart accosted my nose.
He showed me how after closing the little door behind us, he could, by pulling a string through a small hole -- draw the cupboard back into place. Paranoia? Well, I thought, it must be pretty hard to sleep soundly with all that stuff just sitting there.
He sat me down in front of one of these green mountains and gave me a pair of scissors, and I began clipping while he looked on – checking me out. When he was satisfied that I was doing a fair job he took the other chair in front of one of the mountains, which was nearly as big as him, and started work on it. Clip-clip! clip-clip!
As I mentioned earlier Ralph is not very forth coming with information -- especially information about himself. So there was a rather laboured one-way conversation... at first:
‘Was he from the East or West?’
‘West.’
‘From where?’
‘Different places.’
‘Big City?’
‘No.’
‘.....? Small towns?’
‘Villages.’
‘How long have you been in Berlin?’
‘I come and go.’
‘Do you like Berlin?’
‘It’s OK.’
Mmm... I felt like a little inquisitor of time and space. I realised our little association wasn’t going to tax my German, nor his English. And it went in this ungutlichkeit way with each new subject. I was running out questions and ideas, until I casually asked something about the grass. Then he suddenly came to life -- a ghoul emerged in his dead face. And he began to gab – a lecture – a sprach fest -- it was as if he had been vaccinated with a gramophone needle. I couldn't’t get a word in edge ways -- he was off! Clip clip! He seemed to know about it from one end of it to the other, going on like Mr Nice, but without the charm, all delivered in a monotone, as if he was reading yesterday’s grocery list. It was as boring as the warm up act in limbo. His tone so empty, his mouth pinched, the face movements economical, striped of any possible expression or passion, with the eyes of the March Hare staring. I suddenly realised I had never seen him smile, never.
After a couple of hours of his ‘herba sacra’ chin wagging my brain hurt, and my fingers were sore from the clip-clipping, and he was still planting, cultivating, weeding, fertilising, grafting, cropping his Cannabis Indica. Clip-clip! And he didn't’t draw rein there, he was talking THC, cannabinoids, etc. The information was clogging the gates of my consciousness. I became a distant dreamer – a miles away man. Clip-clip!
I was imagining Astrid still curled up with the stars in my bed, where I’d left her. Astrid, Astrid coming from everywhere. Clip-clip! I hoped she would still be there when I got back. I had written her a note telling her I would be home at about eleven o’clock, and if she waited I could cook something, or we could go out to eat. Clip-clip!
So when Ralph finally ran down and stopped talking it was like the pre-big bang silence. I took my chance, cut my stick, and hied it home with a hundred grams of the green treasure stuck up my shirt. As Snaglepuss used to say, ‘Heavens to Mercrotrode even! Exit stage right!’
I was surprised when I got home to find Astrid wearing nothing but one of my shirts – how it clung to her curves. She was cooking a pasta tonno, and had a breathing bottle of Medoc awaiting me.
