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“The only trouble with living here” Una was saying “is that you get lazy and complacent……”

I could see what she meant. It must have been close to midday by the time we properly awoke and even then Shangri La still had it’s slowcoach mode firmly in place. Almost an hour passed before we got out of bed after that.

We didn’t insult the meal by calling it breakfast or even amuse it by calling it lunch but we did eat the remainder of the food Una had bought the previous day; more out of habit than anything else as neither of us was really hungry.

Strong coffee did little to stir us from lethargy either, when loose bathrobes clothed us. But when we cuddled, which was frequently, we did so skin to skin.

“You know” she murmured at one point during the proceedings “I think tonight I’d like to take you out for a meal”

“But I’ve nothing to wear!” I said. Una laughed.

“There is a wardrobe full of clobber upstairs”

I wanted to tell her I’d rather stay with her, naked in Shangri La but she ploughed on with her plans to get me dressed and take me somewhere else.

“How about the little place in Woodbridge I know of” she asked “where a lot of the yachting fraternity go”

“Oh yes!” I said “And what will they think when we roll up there?”

“They’ll welcome us!” Una promised me.

“I’d rather stay here like this……”

Una bent and kissed me lightly.

“We can go to bed as soon as we get back” she told me.

“We could go to bed now” I suggested.

“Lets see if I can get a table first” Una suggested

I don’t think I’ve ever been kissed so much by one person in so short a time as I had been by her. She did it again, deliciously, before going off to phone.

……………

“Eight o’clock!” she reported a few moments later “table for two……”

“Eight o’clock!” I yelped “That’s hours away! Can we go back to bed until then?”

It was a silly question really and I knew it. I put my hands on her bum and more or less shoved her up the stairs.

“You’d be really sore by now if I was a man!” I told her some while later.

“So would you if I was” Una said.

She sounded very nearly sorry.

So I kissed her nipples and her navel and the backs of her ears……her knees and her forehead……licked the soft places on the insides of her elbows until she quivered and writhed and we started all over again.

But the magpies weren’t very happy about it Sweethearts. Especially the female. She’d been left with a question unanswered.

“Will those sticks form the foundations for my nest?” she asked again.

“They may well form the foundations for all nests everywhere!” her mate answered this time, “if everything goes according to plan”

Well that mystified the female bird even more because she only wanted a small family sized nest not anything huge like her mate was implying.

But she didn’t say anything, wouldn’t ask the inevitable question.

At least not yet.

“What I propose is this,” the male magpie explained, warming to his subject. “We take one stick each in our beaks and, standing back to back, just over there, we’ll see if we can prop a little bit of the sky up……”

The female magpie stared at her mate in wonder.

“Prop the sky up?” she asked bluntly. “Give me two good reasons why we should do that?”

“Because I’m getting a stiff neck from all this crouching for one thing” The male magpie said.

“And for two things?” The female magpie enquired pettily.

“Wait and see!” The male bird said.

…………………

Much against her better judgement, the female magpie caught hold of one of the sticks in her beak and turned it so that the ends of it were jammed between the sky and the ground.

“Now!” Her mate cried, doing the same, “if we both pull together as hard as we can. I think I know what will happen……”

So they heaved and flapped and scrabbled for grip with their claws on the ground, the movement of their wings causing a sudden and unexpected draught.

Both the sticks bent like bows but not by one inch did the sky lift up.

Side by side the two birds paused in their endeavours and gasped for breath.

“Again!” the male bird cried resolutely, after a minute.

Again they struggled and again they failed, the dark sky still pressed down all around them oppressively.

Again the paused, gasping and breathless, then:

“I have an idea……” the female bird said.

“You?” The male bird squawked, somewhat startled. “An idea? Where did you get something like that?”

She wanted to say she’d found it under a stone or something equally as witty but thought better of it. She was only the female of the species after all.

“Sorry,” she said. “I was daydreaming just now and wondered if it would make any difference if we both pulled on the same stick together……”

“What a strange, twisted, perverse idea!” the male magpie told her. “I wish I’d thought of it!”

………………



They positioned themselves, without further ado, one on either side of the stronger looking stick then grasping it firmly they heaved on it massively, mightily and together.

There came a mighty creaking and crashing noise above them, a jangling of bells and a great clattering as if buckets of bolts, old copper kettles and trays of stainless steel knives forks and spoons out of Woolies went tumbling down the stairs. Broken plaster cascaded around them, lightning flashed and thunder rumbled distantly and, just as they thought they’d both die from all the effort and exertion the stick jerked upright rigidly and unexpectedly.

Blinding light scorched down all around them, startling all manner of things and warming the earth instantly. The dark sky tore open wider so they grabbed the other stick and shoved that under it as well.

Rain fell and grass grew in an instant where once there had been only darkness and aridity.

Then god, awoken by all the noise and kafuffle, leaned of the side of her bower and looked at them.

“Now look what you’ve done!” she scolded, her eyes burning as brightly as the first sunrise. “You’ve separated night from day for me. I hadn’t planned on doing that until next Wednesday!”

Then she sniffed, wrinkled her nose and said: “Sorry, I seem to have scorched some of your feathers. And to think, I was going to call you Blackbirds. Now I shall have to call you something else instead”

The two birds looked at god, then at each other and burst out laughing.

And that is why all magpies are coloured the way they are. Because when the sunlight of that first dawn caught them it turned all their breast feathers from black to white. Now every morning they sit in the very tops of the tallest tall trees, right up against the sky where the sun god can see them and make the most awful squawking noises……

Which is alright if you’re magpies but if you are two randy women in a little house on a beach somewhere then things are often very different.

We made love again of course. Leisurely and languidly, without really trying. We’d no secrets now, nothing to hide and nothing to prove. In fact by mid afternoon I would say we were getting a teeny bit bored with each other. It was seagulls rather than magpies we talked about then. Seagulls and sailors and the possibility of getting ourselves a couple. It was a seaport we were going to after all and seaports were usually full of sailors, so you’d think, wouldn’t you that it’d be comparatively easy to pick up a man.

“I could do with a nice stiff cock!” Una announced “Couldn’t you?”

“Sounds like fun!” I said enthusiastically. An enthusiasm I far from felt.

……………



I thought The Captain’s Table looked very posh when Una and I walked along there. Up market it certainly was if the number of Chelsea tractors and Beamers parked close to it were anything to go by.

“Some people wish they could drive right up to their tables” I suggested.

Well we walked up to ours, a lovely little circular one all on its own in an alcove, set out invitingly with pale tablecloth, candles and flowers. The flunkey wished us the best of evenings and poured Una a little of the wine.

“Nice!” she said, which seemed to he what he wanted to hear. Soon after we decided what we’d have to eat.

Oh it was a smart place, that Captain’s Table! Smart enough to make you wish you could live the life all the time.

“You’d soon get bored!” Una said when I mentioned it “Believe me! Fat and lazy and discontented. I see people like it all the time in my line of business”

I didn’t ask what her line of business might be, I just drank my wine and wished I felt more contented.

“Discontented I can understand” I said. I was beginning to feel exactly that. Because I’d only come down off the Way to get myself some chocolate, now here I was shacked up with a woman, eating a presumably expensive meal with her in an expensive restaurant when all I really wanted was……was……

The food was cleverly presented and the restaurant filled with interesting people, the wine was some of the best I’d tasted in years and with Una for company I could not have asked for anything else. Except that I was wearing a dress which didn’t fit me very well, eating food I didn’t really want, in a place where I felt out of place and uncomfortable.

It was all too regimented for my liking, too good, clean, robust, colourful and……and, well sitting as I did, where I did and knowing what I did suddenly the entire tableau was exposed as a gigantic fake.

Suddenly I began to feel slightly ungrateful

Una was saying something but I wasn’t really listening. I’d got magpies and seagulls and wild geese all mixed up. High winds and high places called me, the thrill of the unknown, the challenge of travel in, on or through whatever medium. Rather than a prettily decorated plate I wanted a proper meal, a hacked haunch or a spitted fish, seared by woodsmoke and as redolent as the earth as it burned itself away to utter deliciousness on a campfire. Then I could sit with my bare feet on the earth and my bare arse on it too, looking into the little caves and hollows the embers in the fire made as it scorched my shins and made my hair go all curly. I mean, you’ve never had venison until you’ve had a spit roasted steak cut from a beast fresh killed or fish until you’ve had fresh caught plaice, dab or flounder cooked on a hot flat stone.

Una was saying something which I didn’t hear.

Absently I nodded, seeing hillsides and horsemen, shorelines and sails on the horizon, fanciful things, fantasy things, the things which were much more real to me than any fancy restaurant with its clean white linen and sparkling wineglasses. Sometimes the finest food may be eaten with one’s fingers directly off the belly of one’s lover. Sometimes the finest food may be eaten with the fingers alone without the involuntary jerking of excited muscles. Some……

“……you ok?” she was asking.

Yeah!” I said “Sorry……I was miles away……”

“Were you dreaming?” Una asked.

“Daydreaming!” I said.

“Anything interesting?” she asked.

“The usual faraway places with strange sounding names……”

Una looked at me questioningly.

“Isn’t that a song from a film or something?”

The fringes of the faraway drifted closer, like the edges of a bank of fog, half hiding, half revealing, tempting. I thought of the men and women I’d loved in the past, some now so long ago that the memory had all but faded. Men and women, oh, how many could there have been. Lovers and dreamers, most of them. Dreamers just like me. And those were the lucky ones, lucky because they’d learned and lived and loved. Learned the Lady’s signs and words and lived to love……

“Words!” I said “They’re only words!”

“Yes……?”

I looked down at the plate of food I’d merely fiddled with, then up at Una’s face where I saw only disappointment.

“This is lovely!” I exclaimed sticking my fork in.

The food tasted of nothing when I chewed a forkful. It may have been fish fowl or meat or a combination of all three for all I knew.

“I should have listened to what you said” Una murmured sadly.

“Hmmm?”

“Should have listened to you when you suggested staying in bed”




© Aahlu. 221010.