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“I should have listened to you!” Una repeated. “Instead of dragging you out here where……”

“Its lovely!” I told her.

Suddenly I felt selfish and spoiled and ungrateful. I had another stab at the plate of food but succeeded only in spilling some of it onto the tablecloth. I saw then that it was some kind of fish.

“Not so long ago……” I said, more to myself than anyone else.

“What?” Un asked sharply.

“Not so long ago” I repeated “I cooked a fish on a campfire……”

“Go on!” Una urged. “What was it like?”

“It was a flatfish of some sort, out of the estuary where I’d camped on the edge of…… not the Narr, not any river on Mother Earth I don’t think……”

“Oh!” Una exclaimed.

That ought to have been warning enough for me but I ploughed on foolishly.

“Cooked on a hot stone it was……”

And then, exactly as I was about to burn my fingers, from away under a hillside a scruffy white van called to me and it was my turn to gasp.

“……you ok?” Una asked sharply.

“Sorry!” I said, my head still flying at forty thousand feet “I……I was just thinking!”

“Fatal, that!” Una said with an odd little grin.

……………



“So what’s got into you?” Una asked on the way home.

She’d already driven some miles in what I thought to be entirely the wrong direction before she plucked up the courage to ask me.

So I told her, in a muddled up kind of way about how I was feeling, about how the meal in the restaurant had reminded me about something that had happened on one of my travels.

“I was cooking that damned fish on those hot stones when……this is really weird, my ship called out to me…...”

That was a big mistake, one made entirely without thinking.

Una almost stalled the car.

“Ship? Ship!” she yelped “You……you mean……!”

I sort of nodded, sort of shook my head, kicking myself for being so stupid knowing it would be useless trying to explain anything to her after that.

……………



Una stopped the car in a gateway out in the sticks somewhere. In the pitch darkness an empty field yawned and there, exactly as I knew it would, it began to rain heavily.

“O…..shitttt!” Una murmured and began to cry.

I suppose I am pretty useless when it comes to sympathy. Oftener I am harder on myself than I am on others, but sympathy? Understanding? Those hats sit very uneasily on this self centred old head.

“You might have said” Una sobbed slowly “When we first met, you might……have given me the sign……”

Anytime now I’ll start beating myself up.

“You didn’t need to know!” I told her. “Didn’t need to and I wish more than anything that I hadn’t told you!”

“Shittttt!” Una muttered again “The original Cowrie and……and I didn’t know!”

I felt rather like the shit she’d mentioned then. Selfish, thoughtless and a lot more negative things.

“You didn’t need to know” I repeated as rain battered the windscreen.

“Is it right what they say” Una asked suddenly “That you are immortal?”

“Not true!” I said “Not true at all!”

“Then what?”

The rain smashed at me with an unbelievable ferocity when I opened the door. I got out of the car while Una stared open mouthed at me.

“Like Merlin” I told her “I live at a different rate”

And like Merlin, still trapped inside the oak tree I was trapped in this vast web of misinformation, mistrust and downright lies. It used to be said that the very first Cowries, those who carried Her original shells, were ambassadors for a new way of living and thinking. It used to be said……

I suppose my words were diluted by the rain because I don’t think she heard me. If she did she didn’t immediately make any reply. I walked round to the front of the car and stood in the headlights, the borrowed little black dress, already wet through clinging to me like a saturated cotton curtain.

The mud in the gateway was much deeper than my shoes, the rain in my eyes, nose and mouth wetter than ever and I loved it. This was real, this outdoors, this darkness, this exhilarating weather. I hardly noticed Una at all until she shouted at me.

She must have switched the lights off, the engine off, must have realised……

I lost both shoes almost instantly, their heels sticking the mud and staying there so that the next steps I took were in my bare feet. Dimly I heard the car door slam shut behind me and for one mad moment I expected to hear Una driving away. Instead when I looked back I saw her standing beside the car gesticulating wildly.

A curtain of rain as solid as any sheet of steel drove us apart. I staggered, turning an ankle, blundering into what felt like an impenetrable swamp. I knew that if I fell I would probably choke or drown yet something raw and exhilarating forced me further away from the car. And then……

……and then……from within the maelstrom I heard, unmistakably and quite distinctly, the voices of my ancestors intoning calm yet unrecognisable words. All my senses guided me, for seven short steps, eight, nine, ten then, as I turned my face away from the sharp stinging rain I realised, somehow saw, the apparition that was Una leaping madly after me.

Blindly she stumbled, bashing into me in the blackness, clutching at my hair, my saturated clothing grabbing at anything and everything. We staggered together, half drowned, half blinded by the torrential rain in darkness too thick to see anything anyway and suddenly she was screaming, clawing at the front of my dress with both hands until the saturated material tore away.

“Do it with me!” she bellowed madly.

We were both different people then. Wild women from the dawn, fighting for something which time and civilisation had long ago forgotten, an urge which the fringes of the faraway had kept hidden from our grasp for far too long. Something that the vision of hot stones and campfires had triggered for me and which for Una was now triggered by the dark and the cold, the gale and the rain.

Somehow we found a place in the lee of the hedge where we ripped and tore at each other’s clothing as if possessed. Screaming we slapped and scratched and dragged at each other, clawing and clutching as we staggered and stumbled and tumbled onto the earth.

I wanted to be on top but so did she and so entangled we writhed and rolled, over and over on the sodden ground, gathering mud and mould and bits of stick from the hedge, spitting mud and mucus, coating and couching and becoming one with the earth.

She howled when I bit her, biting me back in the same moment, drawing blood and adding to it all in the one same frenzy.

Snarling I fought to possess her, conquer her, subdue her with all the weapons I could bring to bear. In turn she pinioned me with her thighs, pressing me into the muck with her hands, bouncing, yelling, desperate to get the better of me.

Somewhere in the midst of it all we made the connections, heaved and hurled ourselves into that insane, skin stinging eighty eight once again, arms and legs entwined, wound into and around a maze of mud and leaf mould under the hedge.

Freezing discomfort snatched my breath away, smashed at me and sent my senses reeling. A furnace raged within my belly, searing sense and sanity and in that surging blackness we might both have drowned or suffocated so very easily. For a while it got way beyond the merely uncomfortable, rushing closer to the realms of dangerous as we burrowed into the earth and ate it, swam in the rain and drank it revelling madly as freezing mud and water surged into our every pore, coming frighteningly close to overwhelming us, to killing us with exposures million pointed knives. And for me it was nearer an earthquake than the groaning rush of the explosion of release which tore through me unexpectedly.

And for a while how Una felt about it all I didn’t care. She lay limply, as if dead, as if she’d drowned or choked or I’d somehow suffocated her. Liquids trickled, fluids leaked, grit grated and chafed on knees and thighs and in the darkness I saw her body gleaming palely, legs spread wide in grotesque supplication in front of me while I, still squatting astride her, heard, half heard the whooping and clapping of the ancestors who’d supported me. Their fires burned and their bodies gleamed and in the midst of it all when their eyes fixed on me I found myself suddenly shivering uncontrollably.

“You’ve won! You’ve beaten her!” odd voices screamed. In the blackness their hideous bodies leapt and cavorted, throwing praise and ridicule in the same words gutturally.

They were bears or chimpanzees, primates of some sort, they must have been. And yet through it all I understood all that they said. When I moved they yelled and when I struggled to rise, streamers of slime slithering from me, they crowded closer, reaching to touch me reverentially.

They were ordinary men and women of some sort, they must have been but oh how many millennia removed were they from me. Parents, grandparents? What? Relatives certainly, that much was hazily apparent to me.

“Won! Won!” Their words echoed in my head “Won, and the winner takes all!” their wild words said.

I saw my prize then, standing a little apart. Acolytes surrounded him, slaves prostrated themselves at his feet. My prize was there if I wanted it, all of him, and terrifyingly, if he wanted me.

They circled us, yelling and grunting while flames soared skywards at their cave mouth.

Our union was brief, thankfully, and not a little violent. For a moment I thought his intention was to tear my legs off. But I accepted him, took him, held him against me in spite of his hairy iron hardness and overpowering stink.

There was no finesse about him, no thought of pleasure nor any emotion save the overpowering primitive urge to increase his progeny. And in that he could not succeed for, as surely as ten thousand years separated us the weapons I bore murdered in the same instant every seed he squirted explosively into me.

……………



“Are you ok?” I heard myself saying and somewhere by my feet Una groaned horribly.

I reached for her, touched her, felt her, saw something I recognised, her washed out shoulder criss-crossed with scratches and bite marks.

Slack jawed she gaped at me, half dead with terror, half dead with cold. And lighter than a feather she was when I hauled her to her feet.

“Don’t……don’t……don’t!” she mumbled matted hair plastered all over her face.

She would have fallen again immediately had I not held onto her, like a skin and bone doll shuddering uncontrollably against me.

“No don’t!” she quavered again.

“Are you ok?” I heard myself repeating but with all the noise of the storm if she spoke at all I didn’t hear her say yes.

……………



The wind tore at us with unabated ferocity when I half dragged, half carried her towards the car. Everything ached, everything hurt and with her clumsily burdening me I began to think I’d never make it. I might have left her there so easily, three quarters dead in the mud when I was as good as three quarters dead myself, but I didn’t. I slapped her face hard and screamed at her, calling her selfish and useless and a stupid fat bitch as viciously as the stinging raindrops which hurtled as sharp as hands full of gravel against our skin.

And thus, more by luck than anything else I found myself, with Una somehow stuck to me, staggering drunkenly into the side of the car.

She fell as if dead the moment I let go of her, soundlessly down onto the mud at my feet.

Blindly I fumbled for the door handle, terrified for a moment that it might be locked. Then the door opened and the light came on and I shoved the empty apparition that was Una onto the seat.

I don’t recall actually getting in on the other side, my recollection is of a sudden lessening of the battering wind and rain on my skin. A moment later, perversely I discovered I was in the drivers seat with Una lolling limply on the passenger side.

……………


Somehow I found the way back to Shangri La, taking the wrong turning at least three times and having to backtrack. After one such turn I could have sworn we passed the gateway into the field again, everything looked the same in the rainswept pitch dark. Then I slowed on a bend and a car going the other way lit up a sign I recognised. Its headlights illuminated our interior starkly as it raced past, red lights flaring briefly, drawing slick semicircles of blood in the arc of our windscreen wipers.

Five minutes later we were bumping across the edge of the beach towards Shangri La’s gate and a few moments after that I found myself carrying a by now completely inert Una bodily inside the house and slamming the door.



© Aahlu. 271010.