He'd bought me perfume and some jewellery, beautiful earrings in amber and gold. Don't go mad. I'd said by email, weeks before and he'd assured me he wouldn't in his reply. Now here I was, having driven eighty odd miles on a freezing winter's afternoon, enthroned on his sofa, surrounded by torn wrapping paper and the expensive symbols of his love. 

It'd been touch and go for a while, getting out of Norfolk in those conditions, but in Lincolnshire the roads were better though the same old worries lurked there, in the back of my mind. What about if I broke down or had an accident? What would people think of me then? To tell the truth I didn't care what anyone thought really. If I broke down then I'd phone him and wait for him to come out and rescue me………if I was involved in an accident, well then I probably wouldn't care. I suspect ambulance crews have seen most things anyway so I doubt if a man dressed as a woman would bother them much……… 

I need not have worried anyway, for the traffic was light and I didn't speed, even on roads that clearly had been salted. I just kept the heater on high and the music on medium, or was it the other way around………? No matter, I got to him safely and in plenty of time.
You look great! he told me smiling while I tested the perfume on the back of my hand. I'd lost a couple of pounds, well seven and a bit actually, especially for the occasion and because I wanted to wear my favourite skirt for him. But later on, when he took me to that discreet restaurant on the bend of the river where men can go openly, I put back a couple of those lost pounds again. 

He is a man who appreciates subtlety, and the cleverness of ordinary, beautiful things. He is educated too, or at least he knows some stuff. "For he does not honour bright eyed Aphrodite, or with violence bustle……after cash, or……enslaved to female impudence, drag himself along ……a frozen path……" 

That was what he said, quoting some long dead Greek. 

The waiter sniffed disdainfully when I insisted on sitting at a table in the window. He wanted us right at the back, out of the way but I was convinced it was going to snow and wanted to see the very first falling flakes. Instead, as the evening wore on it just got colder and colder until the empty streets put on their darkest cloaks in order to appear dismal and gaunt and make us shiver when we walked back to his car. 

………… 


We listened to Christmas morning's bells while we breakfasted in bed, more of a brunch by the time we'd woken. The cathedral is on a hilltop in Lincoln, with mediaeval roads leading up to and around it and a river running sternly round the foot. On a hilltop like a castle, grey and forbidding, just like the Christian faith whose effigies stared accusingly across the rooftops at our window. We got crumbs and marmalade on each other, spots of coffee on the quilt and, jointly, a holier than thou attitude towards those assembled inside the vastness of that building. Then we worshipped at our own altar again, making offerings both fresh and stale, our prayers progressing in small grunts and sighs and quiet bursts of fervent homage. 

We dozed 'til noon, comfortably entwined like Achilles and Patroclus, while winter airs shivered the curtained window and the bells fell silent. But it was not love…… was it? No, no! He shakes his head…… grins, makes more coffee until his flat is redolent with the aroma of it. No, not love……..course not. I just like your body……just like the way you taste, smell and the way you dress. 

Well I'm no spring chicken, I can take it, oh yes, he is younger, but not much. And for all that, just as with that other ancient couple the question arises again: Who is the lover and who is the loved? 

Does it matter? He asks, though I'm not the one wearing mascara and anyway, this is no marriage bed! It is neither large enough nor strong enough. Besides, you are married already, to a woman, whereas I shall never be betrothed to anyone! 

You will be one day! I suggested but he shook his head, sadly, not meeting my eyes, nor arguing with me when, at haste's gate the next day we kissed and made our promises. 

Oh yes, oh yes some partings can be such sweet sorrow, but he was late for work and I, in sore need of Norfolk air again when I left him there at the gateway. 

I'll email you tonight, he told me, fiddling with his keys, impatient to be off. Okay I said, knowing he probably wouldn't but accepting it anyway. 

Now he's two and a half hours away, working somewhere out on the wolds, still tasting my kisses and remembering the way I laughed when, without prompting, he called me his love. 

……………..

I slept for a long time when I got home, still warm with the memories of him. Soundlessly I slept almost missing my alarm until its insistence finally unslumbered me. Reluctantly I rose, went to the window and saw, startlingly, a bank of low cloud as big as a mountain range moving ponderously beyond the hedge. Slate grey and towering high enough to blot out the morning, it dragged shreds of the old year away with it, shoving aside dawn's curtains in order to haul a new day into being. 

It had been a cold night again, I could see, icing sugar hedges and shivering starlings, bedraggled bushes, a teacup left out by the sundial, a lost glove frozen grotesquely on the lawn. What time was it really and hell………what day? 

I remembered him clearly then, in a shiveringly quick rush of emotion. In the cold light of day. What he'd said and what we'd done. The pain and the passion and yes, the love too, in a certain sense. Now perhaps my resolutions lay broken already, my promises unfulfilled, my letters not written nor my kisses sealed…… 

But he had emailed, as he said he would……and not exactly as I'd expected either, his words cheering me, encouraging me, making me feel sexy again. He'd had time to think about it, he said……a lot of time, most of the afternoon after we parted and the evening too and…...yes.
You are different, he tells me……… (thank goodness for that I think)…not like any other man I've ever met……… (hell he is going to tell me he loves me in a minute)……but no…not quite……not quite yet. Well you are too I tell the keyboard. Different from the last man I had. Different but fragile, unsure and uncertain……. It's a long email, unusually……the ones I usually get are mostly acronyms or smileys and little else…oh how a language can evolve and ……degenerate, it leaves a taste………a hint, no more………as I did with him, and, less obviously, an implication. Because there is so much more than action and reaction, a lot of simply lying and looking, of tickling and tracing, of drawing lines with tongue tip or finger, so much in the sacred act of wishing, really wishing……… And, sometimes, on rare occasions when the moon is full…I really wish I could be …a woman physically, just for him. A woman who'd show him how to lose his fear of women. 

It's a long email, suggestive……hinting. Is there life beyond my planet I wonder. Others like me or unlike me. Green monsters with antennae and glowing eyes or merely a green slime as yet unchallenged in its primeval state. 

Tea helps a little, re-reading with me his halting lines, disseminating questions from innuendo like the lace from the knickers I wore for him………why can't he ask me straight out, I wonder. So I fetch the ruined garment……ripped and aromatic as it is……hey yes I know you'd like to hear that……then sniffed and draped behind the keyboard the remains of those twelve quid knickers. And yes I tell him……yes, of course I want to see you again. 

Clicking on send is an anticlimax……but momentous in potential and possibilities……a world changing ………perhaps, decision, made and irredeemable ……no going back. And thats the exactly worrying thing. 

………… I passed a road accident on the way home from him yesterday. Missed it by a mere whisker myself because I stopped at the lights. Two people carriers at a crossroads a mile further on, with debris still in the air as I approached. And it made me wonder, as I drove by, how much of life is little more than cheap shiny plastic broken dreams and crumpled tin. 

Two dead and seven injured they said on the radio later. Well I was home by then, when the road was closed while they recovered the wreckage, men sweeping and shovelling shards of plastic back into one of the wrecks, spreading sand on the tarmac to soak up the oil and fuel that was spilt, police examining suitcases and handbags, and the crushed, still wrapped Christmas presents scattered on the verge.
Yeah, life is as flimsy and as fleeting as those vehicles…….an entire dashboard adorned the hedge…..a seat cushion, red with blood, a shoe, there in the road as I passed, and it made me wonder…..no it made me worry and wonder……if sometimes I might not be next……… 

So I put the torn knickers away carefully, in an envelope in the back of a drawer, had a shower and dried myself leisurely, applied just a little cream and thought about him some more. I have to balance some things, or make them balance as best I can. I want him a lot but not too much and a hundred miles, near enough, is a good distance between us. Safe. So I won't go running to his arms, or he to mine, at the slightest provocation. It'd be too easy to do that if he were nearer. No, a hundred miles is just about right. 

I put on a bathrobe and found myself hard with his memory and wishing I had a picture of him, or something with his smell on perhaps, to help me. Then, much later than usual, I made myself coffee, got dressed ordinarily and reluctantly began my working day. 

© Aahlu Years end 2009.








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Love Lives in Lincoln

by

Aahlu









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Fri, 2nd April, 2010





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