Beaches

It was my little bit of sky, over a small section of roof that
lurked between the derelict and the two brick walls of the machine shop
that hemmed it in like a couple of New York bouncers. The roof was
slightly sloping and made of gray slate tiles, jutting from the side of
the brickwork and running down to a gutter at the bottom where a gap of
a half-foot separated it from the facing wall of the next
building.


Clawing bramble and nettles were growing up the narrow gap,
writhing round the chain link fence that ran pointlessly along between
the two facing walls. If I were to reach down from the roof I could
just have touched the top of the fence, but I'm sure that it's the only
way anyone could get to it.


The buildings seemed to have been built on top of each other
with no real care, sometimes knocking down the previous buildings,
sometimes not. Here and there, short sections of freestanding wall
nestled up alongside the current buildings like abandoned children
seeking shelter and along it all grew unidentified weeds and mosses.



When the wind was up, my little corner of roof top was
guarded from the elements by the towering walls and the spray of the
rainwater was whipped off the tops and could be heard pattering on the
leaves of the brambles in the trench, but somehow, my corner remained
stubbornly dry throughout.


I was sitting, listening to the night's rain, watching the
slim block of dark cloud that represented my view of the sky. I had a
cigarette in my mouth; a hand rolled one, badly hand rolled as it
happens. It had gone out about half an hour ago and I was wondering,
off and on, if I could be bothered to move enough to fish a lighter
from my pocket to relight it. Somehow moving seemed like too much of an
effort, and I didn't feel like smoking it anyhow. My hand clung
habitually to the neck of a bottle and I idly rolled the heavy glass
base across a join between two roof tiles, tucking my thumb into the
open throat as if to stop the rain watering down the vodka. I observed
the contents, a rocking tide line like a clear ocean washing against
the transparent curve of icy cliffs.


Glass is made from sand, I thought. I wiggled my toes inside
my boots to see if my feet had gone to sleep and they tingled, sending
a wake up call along my legs. The hard cold surface I was sitting on
was probably cutting off the circulation. I should probably move. But I
didn't. I wanted to see the sea again, to feel the warm gold sand under
my feet and catch the spray from the surf on my face. Not much chance
of that today, I figured.


So I spent my time absently trying to figure Scott out. Scott
was an all right kind of guy; I always had the feeling that he wanted
to be a bastard but somehow couldn't get into the swing of it and ended
up being nice by mistake. Makes a change from all the guys who try so
hard to be nice and end up acting like complete bastards, I guess. He
probably won't go out of his way to find me a place to sleep again
though, not after the mess last night. I kinda freaked out. Too much
vodka, too little sleep and too much on my mind I
guess.


So, Scott was all good, in his own macho way. I didn't like
his girl though. I had a hard time figuring the pair of them out; I
guess what it came down to really, was that Anita scared the shit out
of me. There was something deeply wrong with her that I didn't
understand and couldn't approach. She had that look in her eye that
said she'd kill you rather than talk to you because it was easier. Why
they were together I wasn't sure? did he know something I didn't? Was
he really as nuts as her? I think I settled on the assumption that
Scott wanted to help her, and ended up getting too deeply involved to
get out alive.


I heard the scrabbling long before I saw Chen-Li's fingers
grip onto the lip of the roof. She was too short to climb up easily and
had to make do with edging along a section of spare wall before making
a determined leap for the rooftop, catching on with her fingers and
then hauling herself up. I watched her fingers for a while, listening
to the sound of her feet scrapping against the wet brickwork as she
tried to gain purchase enough to get an arm up on the top.



Eventually Chen-Li appeared on the roof, first and arm,
followed quickly by the other and then her little round face propped
itself on the edge. Her hair was a mess of little black rivers running
over her head and her chocolate covered eyes peeped out from somewhere
behind. The look implored me for a helping hand in the great climb, but
lethargy still held precedence and so I sat and watched her struggle up
and roll onto the tiles unaided.


Once she had regained her breath I offered the bottle. She
swept her hair out of her eyes and took a quick swig and then made a
face like a child taking medicine, running her tongue over her top
teeth and squinting. She passed the bottle back and I allowed myself a
half-inch while I watched her pick the few remaining thick strands of
hair that the rain had plastered to her face and reposition them behind
her ears.


Chen-Li hunched down on the slope in front of me, her legs
folded up under her so she was practically sitting on her own feet.
Rainwater ran from her hair down the side of her face, causing her to
squint with one eye, blinking the water out, and her fancy red silk top
adorned with Chinese flowers was soggy and bore the mossy smear marks
of her recent ascent. Her face was somehow lemon shaped, her cheeks
rounded and her skin was like the flawless surface of a milky coffee
might be, if slightly tinted with vanilla.


I nodded my head to indicate the dry area of tiles next to me
where she could get out of the rain and she gratefully shuffled herself
out of the wind. Chen-Li was, in some ways, a lot like me I guess. We
were both from everywhere, citizens of nowhere. And like me she had
grown up on a diet of bad company, petty theft and correctional
facilities. It's about there the well of similarities begins to dry up.
I don't think anyone would have guessed to look at her, but she was a
year older than me and although over six inches shorter she could still
kick out over my head.


I noticed she had a picture of snoopy on a patch sewn into
her jeans: Another of her little idiosyncrasies, a profound love of
kids cartoons and plastic lunch boxes that went beyond all rational
analysis.
I suppose if I were likened to a magpie, she'd be a ferret. We both
have an interest in shiny things, just slightly different things and
for different reasons.


We must have sat in silence for quite a while, just thinking.
Chen-Li had produced a yellow wooden rose on a green stick from her
pocket and sat absently chewing on the stick end as though lost in some
groundbreaking conceptual world of her own. I just sat and waited for
her to say something. I guess it took her a while to work out what to
say.


Eventually she turned to face me, and I glanced over to show
I was listening.
"You can, you know, come inside if you like, you know after all and
yesterday and stuff, and you know." It was like she was forcing the
words out quicker than she could assemble them into a sensible
sentence.
I finally found the impulse to spark the dog eared cigarette and
fumbled thru my pockets until I found a light. The flint flashed in the
darkness, followed by a rush of gray/blue smoke and I felt my shoulders
relax against the wall.


"We don't want a repeat of last night, do we?" I said in a
second smoky breath. It wasn't a question. Chen-Li wriggled like a fish
on a line trying to find a way to say that the mess last night was
horrible and she knew we didn't want another mess like it, but without
upsetting me in the process. I rescued her from the mental gymnastics
by saying I liked it out here anyhow.


"You must be froze." She insisted. "neprosohshaya kraska, You
got not stay out in rain." Chen-Li had an odd way of speaking that fell
down somewhere between gutter Chinese, Russian and English. It was
almost a whole new language in it's own right. By mixing her personal
dialects of Chenese, Chenglish and Ruschen she has come up with a way
of talking that can only be called Chenish. After a while you got used
to it and knew what she meant, but I don't think anyone else could ever
learn to speak it.


"You must be cold too," I noted, "You don't even got a jacket
on." She was doing quite good impression of a drowned rat, well; she
would have been better if her face weren't so flat. Rats have a proper
snout. Chen-Li made up for it by pouting. I was sure she was really an
excitable twelve-year-old prankster, trapped in the body of a twenty
something, knife wielding criminal.


I took a long drag on the dying zig before flicking the roach
down toward the narrow gap at the bottom of the roof. It pinged off the
brickwork with a pathetic little flicker of hot orange shards before
disappearing into the darkness between the walls.


"You could go about the shop?" she pressed on, almost as
determined to get me out of the rain as Scott had been the night
before.
"I do let you in," she continued, "you rest in my room, I go to Ed's
room, he's staying here." I played the logistics thru my head idly; it
would be good to get out of the weather for a while.


As we talked, Anita came out of the building off to the left;
The building that was home base for a bunch of self-proclaimed freedom
fighters to which Chen-Li and her younger brother belonged: A bunch of
mismatched, idealistic criminals living in the derelicts. Anita stalked
out of the door, her long dark coat whipping in the wind as though she
were auditioning for a lead roll in another Matrix derived movie.
Almost as soon as she had appeared she was gone into the night.



Chen-Li pulled up closer to see what I was looking at just
too late to catch a glance of the Hispanic psychopath, but in time to
see her man, Scott, look out of the door as if to see where she had
gone. He looked up toward the roof where Chen-Li and I were sheltered
but pretended not to see us and headed back inside.
"Shop sounds good." I decided.


The shop, which occupied the top half of a building about an
hour walk away from the derelicts, was made up of three areas. The main
shop floor, cluttered with books and maps and other academic looking
paraphernalia, the back rooms, where there was a small kitchen, and the
upper floor, which was separated into three bedrooms. Chen-Li had
residence in a corner room next to the kitchen rather than one of the
bedrooms upstairs. We crept thru the front door at ground level and
eased the door shut. I had loaned Chen-Li my leather jacket, as she had
looked so miserable and cold on the long walk over, but I'd only worn a
T-Shirt underneath so now I was feeling pretty numb and glad to be out
of the slanting rain. I hugged my arms to my body as we snuck upstairs
to the shop floor, quiet in case anyone was sleeping in the
place.


Chen-Li put the kettle on as we passed thru the kitchen and
flicked on the light in her bedroom. The entire room was overwhelmed
with furry things and glittery things. Bright colors shouted from every
inch of space and bizarre boss-eyed objects on springs gently poinged,
awakened by the movement of the door, as if glad to welcome
us.


While Chen-Li made coffee I quickly rummaged thru her
wardrobe for a dry top that didn't have some dumb goofy face splattered
all over it. It took me quite a time to locate one, but I eventually
settled on plain white T-shirt that had somehow not yet been glittered
and quickly pulled it on before tucking my soaking black one, with the
Merciful Release logo emblazoned across it's chest, under the catch on
the window sill.
Chen-Li appeared with coffee and either didn't notice or didn't care
I'd raided her wardrobe. We sat down by the electric heater in the
corner to thaw. She was still irrepressibly excitable, even after her
drenching, and as soon the caffeine kicked in, she talked
enthusiastically about Snoopy and donkey called Eyesore (or something),
thrusting the offending articles, rendered in various degrees of
fluffy, into my hands. I leaned on the wall and let her talk,
occasionally prodding a stuffed animal on the nose just to see the
expression on its face.


Eventually the supply of cute articles within arms reach had
been exhausted and we sat in silence for a while, clutching our empty
coffee mugs like shipwrecked sailors clinging to driftwood. I reached
over to my discarded jacket and gathered a pouch of tobacco, a light
and some papers. The papers had been tucked into the inside pocket and
had remained dry but the light felt like it'd just picked it out of a
puddle.


I made a cigarette and wedged it into the corner of my mouth
before trying the light a few times without any real hope of a flame.
None came. I tossed it onto the bed and leaned back against the wall
again.
I weighed up the advantages to moving, namely getting a light from the
kitchen stove, getting more coffee and moving my legs before they
dropped off. Against these I weighed up the disadvantages of moving,
which basically came down to having to move.


It was a fine balancing act. The call of nicotine and
caffeine was seeping into my subconscious, however, and so I was forced
to get up.
The kettle was a cheap plastic affair and I filled it and flipped the
switch while rubbing life into my legs with the other hand. The drying
jeans were stiff and sore against the skin that had been rubbed raw by
walking for an hour in the jeans while they were wet. The inside of the
thigh and the calf of my left leg were particularly uncomfortable. I
lit the gas hob with the electric spark button and then deftly lit the
roll-up without loosing all my hair.


While I waited for the kettle to boil I pulled the handgun
from the back of my jeans and examined it to see if the damp had caused
any obvious problems. No reason why it should have, it was a sturdy
gun. I always liked to check though, just in case. Once the water was
done I retrieved the coffee cups from the bedroom and replenished our
supplies of hot caffeine using heaped spoons of cheap instant coffee.



By the time I had made the coffee Chen-Li had buried herself
in a duvet and looked like a huge "hello kitty" marshmallow on the
floor. As soon as I sat down she attempted to smother me in the warm
cocoon too. I pulled myself up to lean against the wall but eventually
had to surrender my legs to the duvet. We sat and quietly drank coffee
for a while but soon Chen-Li's need for constant distraction set us
talking again. She told me about her brother and about Nimzo and about
some of the crazy things they had done.


She showed me a scar on the side of her forehead and
explained how she had been knocked down with a section of pipe by a
thug in Berlin. I asked her what happened and she went on to tell how
she and Nimzo had been set on by some scary drunks after a night out in
Berlin and, although they had beaten the guys, one of them had disarmed
her of a piece of pipe she had instinctively grabbed to defend herself
with and had proceeded to crack her little head open with it. She
became embarrassed as explained how she had needed to be carried,
covered in blood to a mutual friends house. She then complained about
the telling off she got from everyone once she had recovered. I
remember thinking: At least someone cares enough to tell you off.



I showed her one of my scars, the knife hole on the side
under the ribs that I'd tried to sew shut myself while drunk. With the
bad stitching the wound had sealed slightly open and left a mark like
tiny mouth the thread making crooked teeth between the lips of the
scar. I mentioned vaguely where the mark had come from, but I didn't
tell of the days and nights in a fever in a slum. I didn't mention the
way I'd tried to burn it to prevent the infection. I didn't mention the
fighting and the deaths that left me with the wound in the first place.
Somehow it didn't seem as funny as her story. I suppose the drunken
self-doctor bit was pretty funny though, if you look from far enough
away.


I traded the cold coffee cup for the vodka and took a quick
slug. Chen-Li, as if she sensed my suddenly darkening mood began to
tell another story. Her voice seemed come from quite a long way away
and it was a moment before I realized she was talking. Maybe I was too
busy getting hung up on Paradise Island or maybe she really did start
telling the story in her head and just started talking out loud
somewhere in the middle.


She told me about an island, off near Australia somewhere,
where there were a bunch of freedom fighters fighting the government
forces in a bloody war. It was a story about a man, and I could tell by
the quiet way she spoke that the ending of this story wasn't going to
be a happy one. As she was talking I could almost perceptibly feel a
change in her, it was though suddenly she wasn't the happy-go-lucky
fruit-loop anymore, but a scared and lonely woman, looking for answers
as to why the world was such a horrible place. It was like one moment
she was a slightly irritating child that could be tolerated to get out
of the rain and the next she had become someone I could tell anything.
I might never be able to explain it, but I knew at that moment I'd
found someone I could trust.
The man, she never told me his name, was all the things that a man
should be, strong, hansom, wild and honest. He had something he
believed in and was prepared to fight for it, no matter what. Her
description of him reminded me of a man I used to know.


After a while Chen-Li sipped into silence.
"What happened to him?" I asked, self conscious at the sound of my own
voice.
"He was captured." She said, looking up. Her deep brown eyes were
rimmed with tears. "We tried to get him out, but they shot him. Tied up
in a truck."
I just nodded. There are times when even the best-chosen words don't
mean anything.


I passed the vodka and Chen-Li paused for a while before
taking a long drink and gripping the bottle tight as it went
down.


"I knew a guy in L.A. called Beach." I said. "He was an old
guy, I guess he must have been near fifty when I met him. I was only
about ten years at the time. He's the guy who told me that I had to
learn to read, learn how to do all the things that normal kids earn at
school. There were a bunch of us kids, all losers and punks and he told
us what we had to do. I don't think Beach could read or write himself,
he just wanted us to have it better than he did I guess.



"In return for our crazy school work, he'd also teach us
every trick in the book when it came to stealing and general mischief.
We were his gang I guess, most of the kids were taken one way or
another. Some found ways to get off the streets; others got shot or
sent off to prison once they were old enough to hold. Eventually I got
out of L.A. with a bunch or hippies heading for Maine. But I never
forgot the old guy. He made sure I'm not just another dumb Dixie Chick
from Louisiana. He taught me to tap phones, read the newspaper and
field strip an automatic handgun. And he did it all without asking me
to do anything for him.


"We always had a little good luck saying, like a prayer
before a fight or a raid: "See you at the Beach." It didn't mean the
L.A. beach like most outsiders thought. It meant we'd meet up with
Beach after. Later on, it's kinda stuck, and it's a safe way to say:
'If we make it through the night, I'll see you in the morning, if not,
I see you at the Beach.'"
Chen-Li had held on to the bottle throughout. She took another swig and
passed it back. "Here's to beaches."


"Yeah, beaches" I took a couple of inches and closed my
eyes.


"What happened to him?" she asked once I'd righted the
bottle.
"I have no fucking idea," I replied, shaking my head and shrugging
slightly, "same as I keep thinking will happen to me I guess."
"What's that?"
"Found dead in some back ally." I said, taking another sip. "Just
another nameless corpse littering the street to be dragged off to an
unmarked stone in the rear end of some cemetery where nobody ever goes,
to be forgotten."


"Is that what they do?" she asked reaching out for the
bottle.
"I dunno, I guess they might burn them, you know cremation and all that
stuff. Don't suppose it really matters does it? I mean it's not like
you're going to come back for it, it's just left over meat
really."
Chen-Li merely nodded to say that she supposed I was right.
"I kinda wish I could have seen him one more time, you know, just to
say thank you or some shit like that?"
Chen-Li nodded again, to show she knew some shit like that and handed
the bottle back.


I waited till the silence had stretched out to include the
bottle being passed a couple more times before asking: "What do you
make of Scott?" Chen-Li paused with the top of the bottle against her
lip and thought for a second. "Dunno. He's ok 'spose." She shrugged,
and poured some vodka down her throat.


"Is that all there is to it?" I said, raising an eyebrow.
Chen-Li shrugged again. "Not my type." She managed, blinking from the
alcohol burn. I almost laughed. "Not what I meant." I said, scooping
the bottle from her hand. I guess it was still worrying me
somewhere.


"He's ok." Said Chen-Li again. "I know some people got a
problem with him, but he seems to mean well don't he?"


"Yeah, too nice for his own good." I tipped the bottle up; it
was fast running out of juice. "You know where we can get more voddie?"
I asked, waving the bottle up to the light.


"Ed might have some you can borrow." She pulled herself out
from the duvet and wandered rather erratically toward the stairs up to
the top floor.


I finished off the dregs, pulled myself upright and leaned
against the sill by the window. The rain was still coming down in
sheets, like it was trying to drown the city. The harsh orange light
from the street side lamps glittered off the dark rivers that made up
the edges of the road and reflected on the windows of the building
opposite. I glanced at the Mickey Mouse alarm clock on the desk, half
four. Even at this time in the morning there was an occasional car or
scurrying pedestrian still out and about in the
weather.


The room was quite warm and I pulled the window open
slightly, enjoying the cold air. I tossed the empty bottle out and
watched it spray shards of sparkling glass over the sidewalk with a
faint tinkle.
I could hear Chen-Li making her way back down the stairs so I went out
into the kitchen, rolling another cigarette as I went.
"I gots plonky stuff and proper stuff." Chen-Li declared holding out a
couple of bottles at arms length.


"Which is which?" I asked, lighting the zig. She took a while
carefully examining the labels on the bottles.
"This one's the cheap shit," she decided eventually, "the writing is in
English."
"That'll do then."


She passed the bottle over and I opened it and tried it. It
tasted like voddie. I tried it some more. We went back into her room
and I sat and watched the water trickling down the window while she
changed out of the red top and jeans into a huge T-Shirt that almost
came down to her knees. It had a kitten on the front, asleep in a dog
bowl. Then she sat on the bed and tried to get the knots out of her
hair, occasionally going cross-eyed as she tried in vain to see what
she was doing.


"Mennis." I said.
"Dennis?" she pulled the through her hair and it got caught about half
way.
"Yeah."
She looked up, the brush still stuck in her fringe. "What about
him?"
"How long has he been sucking lemons?"
Chen-Li giggled and held her hand out for the bottle. I walked over and
handed it to her. "He likes lemons." She said with a wry grin and
tipped the bottle; it was much more full than she expected, being a new
bottle, and she poured some over her face.


"I'll bet." I managed to resist the urge to use the top of
her head as an ashtray and went back to the window to flick the ash
onto the sill. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and took
another drink and then she rubbed her palm over her eyes as if trying
to keep her head straight.


I pulled a last drag out of the dying cigarette and opened
the window long enough to push it out into the weather and then
wandered back to collect the bottle from Chen-Li's hand. She had rolled
herself up in the duvet on the bed and stared at the ceiling, biting
her lower lip as if lost in thought.


I sat on the edge of the bed and drank more vodka, half
watching the rain and half watching nothing. I figured Chen-Li was far
too drunk by now to bother trying to get her up to Ed's room upstairs
so I just sat by her, rocking the bottle and following the night train
round in my head.


After a while she pulled up the duvet and encouraged me to
put my legs up on the bed, I didn't have the energy to dispute it and
so rolled up and leaned against the headboard while she tried to pull
the duvet over my legs. I still had the damp jeans on, but I wasn't
sober enough to care.


Chen-Li soon fell asleep and so I lay there in a half daze,
looking for the first signs of light on the sky. About an hour or so
passed and the rain stopped but the clouds remained stubbornly dark and
it remained stubbornly night. I shivered slightly and pulled the
bedclothes up a bit. Chen-Li rolled over and put an arm over me,
rubbing her face against my side in her sleep. I was a bit surprised at
first; I'd almost forgotten she was there. I absently patted her on the
head like you might pet a sleeping cat. She rolled over some more
putting her head on my stomach and I kinda wished I'd left her alone. I
was too weary to move though, so I just rested my arm on her shoulder
to stop her moving about too much and turned my attention back to the
sky. I waited in hope for that telltale glimmer of blue that meant the
dawn was approaching, the false dawn that rises before the sun.
Sometimes I waited so long I was sure that the dawn wasn't coming, that
the night would last forever.
The dawn did come today though. Slowly the steel light turned the
buildings outside from black to thick gray. There was no sunrise, no
bright, crisp dawn. Just a slow fade to a sick, cold light that melted
away the night. Damn this country, I thought, even when it's not
raining the air is damp enough to soak into your bones. No wonder all
the locals are so stiff and grumpy.


I remembered I still had jeans on, though I doubt they could
have been wet anymore. I made a halfhearted attempt to move Chen-Li but
it was doomed to failure. At east she was dribbling on one of her own
shirts, not one of mine.


I wriggled myself down a bit until I could lie flat and
awkwardly put the bottle on the table by the bed. I think I knocked
half a dozen things off the table in the process but they were out of
reach so I let them lie where they fell.


I woke up suddenly, with a dry mouth and bleary eyes.
Somewhere I could smell bad coffee. I tried to move a bit and found the
muscles in my legs hurt like someone had gone at them with baseball
bat. I blinked a bit and saw Chen-Li, sitting on the side of the bed
looking at me in a concerned kind of way. She had a towel round her and
another towel rapped round her head. I smiled and squinted at the same
time and she went back to carefully filing her nails. I watched her for
a while and marveled at how someone with such an untidy mind could take
such care to keep her body clean and tidy.


I rolled over, looking for the coffee and found the vodka
bottle. It was nearly empty and I winced. Must be time to cut down, I
thought. Maybe I was still drunk.


"What time is it?" I mumbled, trying to pull my hair together
without moving my head.
"Quarter for midday." She replied, turning back to face me. She turned
herself right round to kneel on the bed beside me and looked down
through the haze of last night's vodka. "You ok? You sleep ok?"
"I think so," I said noncommittally, "do you got any coffee left?" She
ducked down and picked up the coffee from the floor and passed it to my
hand. I struggled to get upright, but with her sitting on the duvet and
me underneath it I couldn't quite manage. Chen-Li took pity on my
fragile condition and helped me get the coffee to my lips without
needing to sit up. It tasted sweet and grainy but it was liquid. She
leaned down and kissed me on the forehead like a mother might comfort a
sick kid. She lingered there a moment, her throat almost touching my
nose. She smelled faintly of some herbal shampoo.


I don't know why, really, but I reached up, running my
fingers up her neck to the base of the towel until I cupped the back of
her head with my hand. I tilted my head back, brushing my nose on her
chin and then back further until my lips touched hers.


Chen-Li didn't move, so I pushed up a little, pulling her
closer. I wasn't sure how she would react and for a moment I had the
feeling that I was about to regret my impulsive actions, but then
suddenly her mouth was open and I could feel her tongue. She tasted of
coffee and fresh mint toothpaste and I found myself worrying what my
mouth tasted like. Stale vodka and cigarette ash, probably. It must
have been like she was licking round the bottom of a nightclub ashtray
but she didn't seem to mind.


After a long moment Chen-Li pulled away and sat back up
looking slightly guilty. I think I lay there for quite some time and
blinked some more, sorting my head out into a more sensible
order.


When I sat up Chen-Li was still sitting facing me, holding
the coffee cup defensively in front of her with both hands. I looked at
her stunned little face; her deep, dark eyes were warm and soft. Right
then, all I wanted was to tell her that everything would be all right.
That things would work out good in the end. I knew I didn't believe it
and I knew that it wasn't true. But I wanted to tell her; I wanted her
to believe it. I guess I didn't want her to live in fear of the
inevitable.


"Chen," I said. The name sounded funny in my mouth and I
realized it was the first time I'd called her by her name, up till now
I'd just called her "Chink" or "Shorty" or some other lame nickname.
Chen-Li just looked at me and suddenly I felt pretty stupid. It was my
turn to sit grasping for words. I probably moved my mouth slightly
while thinking like an idiot struggling for coherence in a chaotic
mind.


While I fished for words, Chen-Li's face became less and less
stunned, until eventually she just looked slightly concerned. She
reached out and touched my cheek. I don't think it did my thought
process any good but it was comforting anyway.


"It's going to be all right." I managed in the end. It wasn't
very original or eloquent I'll admit, but when it comes down to it, it
was pretty much all I wanted to say.
"What is?" She asked quietly.
"Everything." I said as confidently and gently as I could.
"Are you sure?"


I looked her in the eye for a long moment, then leaned close
and kissed her on the end on the nose like an Eskimo.
"Sure." I said. I think I almost convinced myself.
I sat back and we looked at each other for a while in silence.
"You're inside my shirt." Said Chen-Li eventually.
"Yeah, I was kinda hoping you wouldn't mind." I said sheepishly. A
smile spread across her face like the dawn of a new day.
"I don't mind." She said.


I lay back, feeling oddly fuzzy, like I'd had my insides
replaced by big ball of warm cotton wool. Chen-Li knelt on the bed
beside me, the childish look in her eyes was gone and all that remained
was the sunshine smile that seemed to light up the whole room.



I leaned up on one elbow, reaching out with the other hand to
draw her closer. A moment later she lay on top of me, playing with the
knots in my hair while nuzzling the side of my neck and cheek like a
cat that wants attention.


I slowly let my hands brush along the soft towel down her
back, lightly kissing her cheek. It was like every movement was
electric; every nerve was a live wire waiting to be touched. I hadn't
felt like this for so long, years maybe, so long ago I had forgotten
how it felt.


I pulled the towel away from her head so that I could scratch
behind her ears and toy with her damp black hair. She arched her body
against me, pushing her tongue into my mouth.


I ran my hand up her thigh inside the towel and explored her
skin, up over her hip and up her spine, feeling the little lumps of her
vertebra and across the back of her ribs. I followed the arc of her
scapular up to the shoulder and then, tucking my thumb under her,
stroked my hand down her side, until I cupped her hip in my palm. The
towel was still between us, as was the duvet, but her back was now bare
where the little tuck that had held the towel in place had come undone.
My fingers were on fire, hands almost shaking. But it wasn't alcohol
poisoning this time, and it wasn't even really fear, although I was
probably afraid.


Right then I wished she were a man, in fact, if I'm honest I
probably wished she were not only a man, but also about a foot taller
with big strong arms and forceful manner. But hey, if wishes were
dollars I'd be buying out Bill Gates rather than living in a squat.
Even so, although her skin was soft, her muscles were firm and supple
and I'm sure she could have been as forceful as any man should she
choose to be. I had the feeling however that this was whole new
territory for Chen-Li and her movements were quite timid and
unsure.


I held myself back, not wanting to move too fast and scare
her off. I was determined not to fuck this up like I seem to have
fucked up everything else I've ever done.


Chen-Li sailed these uncharted waters in slow circles, moving
further into the unknown with each pass while I used my hands like an
offshore wind, guiding her along my coastlines and taking her out over
the deeper oceans.


It wasn't until she found her way to the button of my jeans
that I suddenly realized that some of my coastlines were probably not
fit to be seen. I had been wearing the same jeans for over a week and I
probably needed to shave my legs. It was too late by then though, I
didn't want to pull away and break the spell in case there was never a
second chance. So I lay back and let her in. She continued to move in
circles, over my chest and then down over my hips, tugging at the
denim, exposing a further inch of skin like the falling
tide.


Her touch pulled the breath from my lungs, my stomach tight
and my body aching. It was all I could do to stroke her hair while she
moved up the ridges of my legs like a wave rolling up the exposed sand.



I turned the tide, rolling Chen-Li over on her back, letting
her guide me along her shores, across her coral reefs and into her
hidden coves. Then we were tangled together, lips and fingertips like
swimming in clear water. Kissing each other's hot breath and closed
eyes while our limbs rapped gently around and through. Each soft touch
was like lightning down to the base of the spine. Diving for pearls and
teeth that leave a mark on the skin.


We spent the whole day laying together, dressed only in each
other. Chen-Li dozed, her head on my chest, her leg hooked over my
hips. I played with her hair, twirling the fine black strands between
my fingers. It was nearly nine when I realized quite suddenly how
hungry I was. I hadn't eaten anything for well over 24 hours and now I
felt a gnawing pain in my belly that was trying to tell me that a
couple of pints of voddie were no real substitute for a meal. Even so,
I was loath to get up, I had a moment of warm comfort and I really
didn't want it to ever end.