ADVENTURES IN A DIFFICULT WORLD (CHAPTER TEN)

We stand and kiss for a while -- kisses that penetrate and plung into me. Arm in arm we stroll slowly back to my place, and make love again. In a haze of crazy intense oxygen we spin and hurl through obits like out of control satellites, raked towards a sucking core of which we ach to be a part.
Later, we lay so close like Siamese twins joined at the groin. While she doses, I weep silently. These tears… what are they? For joy? From the closeness? I really don’t know -- they are a mystery to me. Maybe because I am realising I would have to give the whole of myself to love her. Tears of loss of self? Is that it?
Reluctantly, I untangle myself to go to the toilet. When I return she is sleeping deeply -- looking so peaceful. I don't want to disturb her. I sit watching her in her still white sleep, my thoughts lapping gently on the shore of my consciousness.
Then suddenly memories of my ex come to me again like a pale death song, which fractures the space and throngs through me. Once again I run 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 alchemist's rings set in them. By sleight of high she had sold me Christmas, an idiot’s tale. Her, seemingly ostensible sincerity held 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 large knots in wood. Was it the bells or my brains that rang?
We made love like cats, dogs, rabbits, snakes, fish, crabs, insects; worms. 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 up my 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 pregnant 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 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 texting me, that 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, 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 please just stop...
****
It is six o’clock when I swing round to Ralph’s place. The night like a black hen is gently settling down on the city. After throwing several bolts on the door, Ralph let me in, then quickly replaces them behind me. Again tea is awaiting me, and Sargent Sunshine has one of his space-spliffs sticking in his face.
We sit at the kitchen table, he in his ridiculous little uniform. He closes his open laptop, and give me that paper smile of his. He tells me he has 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 duck through the little door – through the looking glass, into his funny factory where a landscape of green hills towers, and the overpowering reek of dragon fart accosts my nose.
He shows me, how after closing the little door behind us, he can, by pulling a string through a small hole -- draw the cupboard back into place. Paranoia? Well, I think it must be pretty hard to sleep soundly with all that stuff just sitting there.
He sits me down in front of one of these green mountains and gives me a pair of scissors, and I begin clipping while he looks on – checking me out. When he is satisfied that I am doing a fair job he takes the other chair in front of one of the mountains, which is nearly as big as him, and starts 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 is a rather laboured one-way conversation at first:
‘Is 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 feel like an inquisitor. I realise our little association isn’t going to tax my German nor his English. And it's going in the way of ungutlichkeit with each new subject. I was running out of questions and ideas, until I casually ask something about the grass. Then he suddenly come to life -- a ghoul emerges in his dead face. And he begins to gab – a lecture – a sprach fest -- it was as if he had been vaccinated with a gramophone needle. I couldn’t get a word in edge ways -- he was off! Clip clip! He seems to know everything about it; from one end to the other... Going on like Mr Nice, but without the charm, all delivered in a monotone, as if heis reading yesterday’s grocery list. It is 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 staring eyes of the March Hare. I suddenly realise I have never seen him smile; never!
After a couple of hours of his ‘herba sacra’ chin wagging my brain hurts, and my fingers are sore from the clip-clipping, and he is still planting, cultivating, weeding, fertilising, grafting, cropping his Cannabis Indica. Clip-clip! And he doesn’t draw rein there, he is now talking THC, cannabinoids, etc. The information is clogging the gates of my consciousness. I become 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 coming from everywhere. Clip-clip! I hope she will still be there when I get 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 runs down, and stops talking it is like the pre-big bang silence. I take 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 Mergatroid, even! Exit, stage right!’
I am surprised when I get home to find Astrid wearing nothing but one of my shirts – how it clings to her curves. She is cooking a pasta tonno, and has breathing bottle of Medoc awaiting me.