Cathexis (31 page)

“I'll just jar this up and then I want to fuck you” she said, stirring the sweet gore
.

“I'm a spent force”.

“Nonsense”.

“But this won't get the baby boiled” I nodded to the garden.

“Minky, you must get your priorities right”. She had a point. Sex and jam should always take precedence.

Colours caused a riot of emotion; it had always been so, even words and numbers had a hue. When I was a child I thought everyone saw this.  The children at school all tinted. Their names slabs of pigment as they sat in class and smears when they zipped about the playground.

Dale's red bandana, corralling her curls, sang with suggestion. So too the yellow handle of the mattock arcing above it as she attacked the roots of a diseased elder, the black bird's berries already washed and in the fridge.

She'd interrogated me closely on my condition during our hot bed week, when I'd mentioned that the name Dale was sky blue.

“Matthew” she shot at me. “Yellow” I replied. “Martin”. “Orange”. “Barbara”. “Also orange”. “David”. “Green”. “Elizabeth”. “Pink, but Liz is yellow and Eliza black”. “Sven”. “Blue”. “Fatima”. “Mustard”. “Nancy”. “Dark red”. “What about Minette?”. “White, off-white”. “Surely Minky's pink” she said.

“No, it doesn't work that way. It's sky blue ...like Dale”.

My back barking a furore as I shuffled to the loo the next morning. My hands unaccustomed to hard work, throbbed with thorns, the glassy burn of arthritis in my previously broken knuckles. Dale hobbled down the landing; she'd twatted her foot with the mattock, but the limp would be gone by lunchtime. Backlit by sun, her edges gilded, she stood in the bathroom doorway, hips almost losing pyjamas. On her front, a purple Marc Bolan, another of the curly clan, his pretty face distorted by breasts. Blinking, I took a mental snapshot.

Dale bit the teeth of the saw precisely over my pencil line; today we would construct the deck. Her arm drawing the tool back and forth, speeding up to long, even sweeps, which swelled her biceps and ripped my vitals. She followed my direction in a way, at once touching and sexy. She fetched while I measured, cut noggins, braced them with her knee and hammered them home. Laying the spirit level across the joists, she grunted with satisfaction, flicking the bubble. She passed me golden screws from her mouth and supported while I chased them in, twisting her tail to scoop out deep holes beyond the spade with her bare hands.

“Close your mouth” I said, as cement dust clouded our faces. She hurried with the leaky watering can, muscles a masterpiece. Plopping a stick in the cement, banishing voids, the wet squelch prompting an arched eyebrow. By mid-afternoon the carcass was complete and she stepped from joist to joist, marvelling at its integrity.

“We could build a house” she said.

The last of the three thousand or so screws were in by midday, the task expedited by economy of movement and breath-holding. Indulging my disorder because Dale was at work today, leaving me to count and beat the clock. The deck now finished, this afternoon I'd start the overarching pergola, half covered, half open, which would accommodate the wisteria and allow us to sit outside when it rained.

During an unwanted coffee, I sat at the kitchen table and examined myself for happiness. People who claimed to be happy were either lying, deluded, stupid or insane; at least this had been my conclusion. In some respects, happiness was like health  - you only knew you'd had it when it failed. Unhappiness was far more tangible.

A residual Dale within and about me; her bowl and mug in the sink, in my fingers a nascent dreadlock tugged from her head last night after our shower, her dusty, red bandana, a post-it pad, numbers jotted in her good girl's hand and a doodle of what appeared to be a pretty horse with a perm. I couldn't deny all this made me happy. My ‘phone beeped.

'Aching for you, can I come home please? x'

'Hurry x'

“Do you need a hand?” I said, as she scurried between truck and back garden. The clang of tubular metal and the angry wince of an angle grinder from within a small gazebo she'd erected around her project. She’d decided to make something of the drum of a single minded concrete lawn roller discovered in the nettles. The garden, all but finished - daisies, goldenrod, yarrow, salvia, veronacastrum, oatgrass - the plants shouted their allegiance to me in the yellows and blues of an unintended Swedish flag.

Dale emerged from the tent slapping her chaps, indian and brave, the dust-mask on her forehead like a Cyclops with an eye problem.

“What are you doing?” I said, retrieving a confused ladybird from her hair.

“Wait and see” she said. “Better not hang the washing out – I'll be making dust”.

Placing her hands on my breastbone, “Now shoo”
.  A gentle push.

“You're so sexy” I growled.

“Minky” she groaned, “go and play in the house, Mummy's busy”.

The covers were off. I spied on her from the kitchen, circling the upended cylinder, mallet in one hand, chisel in the other, like a gladiator, deciding on the blow of dispatch, heart or head.

Reclining on the deck, I'd enticed her with Pimms. The fine white bloom of a plum on her cheeks and arms, the bandana doing little to preserve her hair from an icing sugar dusting, giving her the appearance of a handsome older woman – a horny prospect. The sweat chased clean runnels down her chest, the silver star on a smudgy cloud.

“You're resonating” I said, “you're in the zone”. This was a state of total concentration and efficiency. A discussion we'd had previously when Dale noted my approach to building the deck, it was unnecessary to reiterate the link between creativity and sex and how they resided in the same room in the brain - bedfellows, so to speak.

The ring of the angl
e grinder and burnt dust now supplanted by the hum of tiny buzzy bodies, at which Prudence leapt, applauding.

I licked my fingers and massaged the black sternum smear, oiled with sweat. Crunching on cucumber, a drop from her glass lead my gaze between her breasts. She watched the concrete pillar with focused cataracts ...I knew she was playing. She leant back on her elbows, still surveying the piece and drew boot heel to buttock; a casual gesture, but explicit in our language. Ruminating on her next cut, she was inviting me to choose a facet: breast, cunt, anything I wanted. Rocking her knee patiently like a metronome.

Taking a nub of ice from my mouth, I set it in the hollow of her throat. She didn't flinch. Roughly, I tugged down the neckline of her vest and lifted out her breasts. They stood proudly in the open air, jacked up, snake-goddess style, perfect and pert.

It occurred to me I may have given them short shrift, not bestowing them with the attention they merited.

“Tits first, I'm not a slag” we had giggled, frequently cutting to the chase. Dale's small congenial tits rose and fell in the sunshine and I felt an indignant disquisition coming on.

'Breasts, by Minette Bracewell.

Breasts (if you said it too many times, the word became weird and unpronounceable). Breasts – ubiquitous, exposed, displayed, purloined, enhanced, inflated; their chief purpose overlooked, for the sake of 'phwoar!' And here were Dale's, tacit yet meaningful, provoking a complex swell of emotions, which could be encapsulated in one word – phwoar!. The end'.

Her nipples budded under the ice.

The full reveal came two days later. While she remained assured of its excellence (she rarely failed to meet her own high standards), my approval was paramount. She snapped off the dust sheet like the table cloth trick and watched my face closely.

It must be a trick after all; other than its shape, the object before me bore no resemblance to the pedantic humdrum. The dull grey now sanded and polished, revealing the plebby pebbles of ballast as noble constellations of malachite and tourmaline, cast in an obsidian sky. On its top, insignia indicating the correlation of time and light, decoding the enigma.

“It's a sundial!” My hands flew to fondle its burnished surface and to trace the letters carved around its belly like a belt. 'Post nubila phoebus', each character a different font, charting an evolution from Heraldic to Helvetica and so inferring the passing of ages. The clockwork comings and goings of the sun.

Latin at school had seized me, an OCD language if ever there was one. “After...” I began. Dale nodded encouragingly. “After
...the clouds
...the sun!” I looked up, pleased in every aspect, and a millennium of love passed between us in an eye-blink.

Chapter 13

Dale's mobile sounding the lolloping chime which disturbed us frequently since her website had gone live. “Hello?'” (a pause). “Shut the front door, you're kidding Jason?” She went outside where she shut the back door, boots pacing distracted laps around the deck and she let rip that war laugh, often and loud.

My face darkened with Othello thunder. She re-entered, smiling from a portal where I did not yet exist.

“That was a friend from college, Jason” she said in disbelief. “I haven't seen him in over twenty years”. She clocked my sullen mouth and flinty eyes. “You'll like him, Minky,. He's a lot like you in some ways”.

“How?” I said, attempting to unruffle my feathers.

“Well, he's funny and kind and really intelligent”.

This did nothing to relieve me.

“Did you go out together?”

“No, not really”

“Not really?”

“We were friends and we got drunk one night, mistake, and then he got a thing for me. It was awkward for a while but we got past it. Come on” she said, “don't be like that”.

Just as my feathers were flattening, her brain whirred. “I know” she said, “let's have a party”.

Glasses now necessary to pluck the whiskers on my chin and some fresh hairy hell around my nipples. Dale downstairs, mixing marinade and singing excitement. Parties made me stern. At least it would be mostly my people; Dale only had three, two of whom
lived in Australia but were in the country for a fortifying fix of drizzle, dark humour and historical hegemony.

“Am I OK in this?” She flumped on the bed. I peered over my glasses at her prostrate body.

“You'll do” I said.

“Maybe I should wear my skirt”. Arching her back and unbuttoning her jeans. Before long, her taut torso arriving behind me in the mirror. “We got tahm to fool around, hunnapah” she drawled, deep south and dirty, suggestively twanging the elastic of my pants, which provoked in me a strange opposition, my psyche assuming the stiffness of a stout English bookcase, or perhaps a Canterbury.

“I think you should put your skirt on and we'll see”. I returned to my whiskers and secretly scanned the room …that would do, a length of dowel that controlled the broken Venetian blind, which remained open always. I tapped it on my palm testily, glowering over my specs in utter matronesse, my garniture gathering gravitas. Dale blinked, the kinky notion uncoiling.

“Minky” she giggled.

“Such insolence” I tutted, reviewing her contours with the stick. “Now, Miss Knudsson, would you be so kind as to assume the position?” She crawled onto the bed in sublime subordination, while I rifled through the knicker drawer, my hand falling on the next contrivance. Scooping back her hair, covering her eyes with an airline issue mask. “Tell me, Miss Knudsson”, my lips to her ear, “What punishment would befit such sass?”

“I don't know” she whimpered.

“Oh come now” I said, “visualise”. I lifted her skirt with the stick, forensically. “I excel in sniffing out trouble”. The stick trailed over her buttocks. “I like to nip it in the...” On 'bud' I hit her, startling myself, but she barely twitched. Unsure where I was going, but unable to reverse, I whacked her again. This time she flinched and if she'd had a tail, she would have swatted it in friskiness. Her bra slid down her arms as I unlatched it. “I have to check these” I said, cupping her breasts as if estimating the weight of prizewinning onions at a harvest festival.