It was once suggested by a historian friend of mine that both the kilt and the fustella, not to mention the Roman toga, were all derived from the long, loose vest like garment supposedly worn by the early Anglo - Saxons. It was certainly an idea which appealed to me when, upon arriving home cold and soaked to the skin by the heaviest summer rainfall this year I sought something warm and comfortable to wear after a revitalising hot shower. Somehow my dressing gown didn’t feel right, neither did tracksuits tops and bottoms in any combination. In the end I found that a big old Harris tweed skirt with a soft silk lining and an even larger sweatshirt, purchased from a shop in the Haigh-Ashbury district some years ago, went down a treat with a large English coffee – that’s fine ground Kenyan beans, Demerera sugar, single malt Scotch and a generous jug of local cream, if you don’t have the recipe to hand, along with a few dozen chocolate digestive biscuits. A fine international combination of food, drink and clothing the gathering together of which made me feel soooooo much better.

Thus warmed I gazed at her, wishing for her to warm me further while she stood, helpfully unhindered by any garments at all. Why even her shadow was absent but outside other shadows grew. And so we sat, as evening faded into night and dozed awhile while darkness crept like a fungus over the walls and windows, which pleased me and filled me with quiet satisfaction. That satisfaction calmed her, for she had become unnecessarily alarmed, some might have said excited, at the growing dark. So shivered she until I hugged her and held her, smoothing the skin of her shoulders and back with my hands while she writhed and pressed her hips against the roughness of my Tweeds. Presently I thought about that coffee again, the mountain juice and the biscuits which I had earlier eaten. Still shivered she, enquiring, her hands searching because I let her, her hips humping the new darkness, squeezing it out from under my skirt like liquid soot. In return she asked to be groped, demanded to be in fact, setting her feet wide in order to facilitate one. And so I obliged. What else could I do? What indeed would you have done? We had to do what comes naturally in that growing sea of dark. It was rather like coffee and biscuits anyway, that darkness, because you see I love the dark, live the dark whenever I can. Eat it, drink it, just like those biscuits and that coffee. “Fuck, fuck, fuck” she whispered, and in the dark I found myself either bringing back old memories or giving life to new ones unexpectedly.

I didn’t bother with a light. There was nothing to see that I was not acutely aware of anyway. Nothing new that I couldn’t already see with my other senses and hers, borrowed, to supplement them. But it didn’t still her, nothing would I knew until she’d got. And had, all she wanted, everything she desired which simply was one reason to take shelter from the dark, two to push herself to her own preset no limits, three to persuade me to take her and keep her, for some duration, within the confines of my bed. Really it was as easy as that.

……………

I wrote her a love song, a ditty, a rhyme, quickly, badly and on dark green paper, because dark green paper was all I had. She hummed the tune, though neither of us had written it, twitching black nailed toes up and down to a beat she claimed she could actually see. I knew it to be the dust motes she’d disturbed with her beating but I said nothing, didn’t argue, just kept my eyes aligned to the curve of her breasts. I don’t think she read the words properly, crumpled now that dark green paper might be, for it was with frustration not excitement that she first received it. Maybe she didn’t read it at all, maybe she merely absorbed it, allowed it to sink through her like rain through a brown paper bag. “I’m faster than a running dog across the hillside steep but lazier than the sheep who amble, chewing, chewing ever chewing, slower than the roots that grow, splitting stones, spitting bones, growing daisy chains all in a row. I can be anything I want to be; a man, a woman, an apple tree - Pick my fruit, smell my blossom, I’m springtime and winter, summer and autumn, all in one. Whatever you can, or cannot, imagine, that is me, That is me. Abstract, insect, animal vegetable mineral, a cloud, a cry, a cup of tea, anything I want to be! So come along now, come, oh come, Come and run away with me…...”

Her eyes widen. She realises. Smiles giggles, doesn’t care. What would you say if I told you that I am always naked when I’m asleep? I ask her. “As naked as you are! Does it bother you?? Ignore the tweeds and the teeshirt I’m wearing now, I’ll cast those off so that not a stitch covers me. There! They’re gone. Now were both alike!” Her eyes reflect her smile, shining in the darkness which is now all but complete. I tickle her triangle unintentionally, then intentionally. Her breath hisses, her slot moistens. She giggles. “It tickles!” “Naked we can go anywhere” I tell her. “Anywhen and anyhow, wild and carefree while the night whispers “Look at them, look at them!”” Then biscuits do not fatten us, nor scalding coffee burn, then companionable darkness chuckles, drags a creased curtain away from where we want to look, lightening a window, that one across the street wherein we want to see the way hat other Him and Her should be together! But well may her curtains hang undrawn, her window lit and her clothes abandoned. Alas, for her lover……he remains……Absent!

Yet we watch, while dark breezes lifts a leaf, shakes a bough, tickles her fancy. She turns, hearing us with her heart not her ears, with her longing not with any sense she recognises, with her juices which ebb and flow from wanting. Carefully I contrast and compare, breast with breast, nipple with nipple. There are some differences but they’re only slight. A tit is a tit, isn’t it, after all. Darkness brightens her, her glass disappears, a spiderweb of restraint, a suggestion for she took not the time to read my words? Naked there she stands awaiting him, shivering. She turns then, in the lamplight, turns and bends to pick up a screw of dark green paper. She turns and the light turns with her, covering this, uncovering that. “Sweetheart…...” the paper says. A tear falls! One single……tear. “We could be so good together” the paper says “in life, in death, in our waking and in our dreams. We could be anything. Anything! Anything!”

“Sad!” she says; we turn away and the tune fades, lost between glare and gloom. “They were the same words, weren’t they?” she asks. I nod, not sorry. She doesn’t care. “They were good words” she says “to begin with. Now tell me what the rest of them were about” I knew it was all of a muddle, one which I could not explain, an odd thread, if you like, of onion coloured wool running wrongly in the tweed of my skirt. “Perhaps……” I start. She silences me. Leave the mystery, lets go back to bed!” I know he’ll never meet her now, it’s late and she will stand, cold alabaster ill lit, waiting, hoping, while he will never come. “Sad!” she says again. I nod. It is sad, and I am sorry. I say so but she doesn’t care.

“Why not phone her?” she suggests. “You have her number. Go on, phone her!” “It will do no good” I say. But I dial her number anyway while she watches for a reaction half behind a curtain.

“Hello?” she asks tremulously.

She thinks its him, doesn’t believe its me. Then she does and starts to cry all over again. Together her light and her phone go off. As if somehow they’re both connected.

“Told you!” I say, not feeling at all triumphant.

She smirks. She doesn’t care. I would have asked her to come over. Would have. Would have. Instead, on dark green paper my love lies writ. Torn and crumpled while she, blinded by convention, could not, would not break her bonds nor take the chance, step across the frightening unknown, the common road which is her boundary, for a while long enough to show herself to me.

© Aahlu. Midsummer 2010.

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