Three Dont Tango 12

Autumn is here. The days are getting shorter, and colder. Indoors things are changing too.
For four days Annabel lay in her large bed; at her side a small bundle: an Annabel and a Minibel; while the hero does the shopping, the washing up, the cooking, and the housework, collects wood from the valley, drives to the pit-head to collect coal, and all the other things to keep the household functioning.
At least the coal is cheap collected from the pit-head, where, for some reason they call the coalfield East Wales.
I shovel vast quantities of the stuff into the back of the minibus, and drive onto the weigh-bridge.
"That's a fat lot of good isn't it?" shouts the guy as he comes out of his office.
"Whadya mean?"
"How the hell am I supposed to know how much coal you've got on there?"
"Well, you weigh it."
"How can I weigh it when you didn't put the van on the weigh-bridge before you put the coal in?"
"Aah.... um...."
So I drive home with about three quarters of a ton of coal weighing the back down, and a receipt for five hundredweight. It sure is a lot cheaper getting coal from the pit-head.
After four days the lady of the house rises from the bedclothes like a modern Botticelli Venus, and I rise from the housework like a released convict, and go forth to paid work.
It is six thirty in the morning. I toss and turn in the bed. I am sort of awake. I feel heavy all over. I am stiff, and feel like a mechanical contrivance that can't move smoothly. I creak and jerk my way out of bed. Outside is a mist, or is that white everywhere a heavy dew, or maybe even frost? There is a soft warm sexy Annabel inside. Outside the bright autumn sun is coming up crisp over the sharp black hill.
The sun streams in golden highways through the tall tree trunks, the shafts lighting a rainbow of motes. Spiders are waiting, their abdomens flickering in the new light. The webs softly vibrate, like curtains at an open window, like a field of corn on the hillside brushed by the wind. The sun brushes the webs. The rising warmth gently filters through. Beetles crawl shakily across fallen leaves, which suddenly capsize and the insects disappear from view.
It is seven in the morning, and I am stumbling my way to the car, getting to work, getting away from home, away from my lovely wife, and away from my two gorgeous little children. What is the matter with me? Why am I running away from everything I want to be with?
Every morning at six thirty I toss and turn in the bed. At six forty-five I get up, and make myself a high speed breakfast. At seven o'clock I lug Annabel from bed. Sleepiness is falling from her hair. I stare, then pretend not to stare, as she pulls on her knickers. I don't hug her and press myself against her as she fiddles with her bra. At least I don't very much. It is a not-much touch. The morning is a jamming together of lots of not-much. Actions stutter. They begin as an instinctive force, then the urges take over, and then the boring logistics of economic reality cut them short. A quick hug and a squeeze, and the temperature rises, and is then cut short as I jerk away from her, and run for the car.
Cephren is asleep. Minibel is asleep. Before we leave we stare at her. Perhaps she won't wake for a feed before Ann gets back. We rush to the car and I drive as fast as the car will go. Twenty minutes later I arrive at work, maybe only ten minutes late, and no-one has noticed I was not on the premises at the magic hour.
Some days I rush to the car. Footsteps on the tarmac strike a chord. The chord vibrates, a message is sent, the nerves judder, and the head lifts from the pillow, and the baby starts to bellow. Ann sighs, shrugs her shoulders, and runs back indoors. She calms the child, settles her down, runs for the door again. The footsteps on the stairs, the front door barely heard but registered gives the message. The tendons transmit. The bellow grows like the rise of a wave.
I go next door. We wake mother. Baby, together with bedclothes is lugged out of the cot and transferred to grandma, and we rush again to the car. I drive at top speed as far as the next farm where the cows are ambling back to their feed after an early morning milking session. I try to edge my way past, but the cows are bigger than the car. They stare with large cow eyes right into my face. They are depressed cows. They amble as if towards a psychiatric ward, heads down, noses dripping, eyes sad and vacant, lonely in their herd, full of a large un-loved-ness.
At last the final backside delivers the final sloppy squirt of dung onto my bumper. The bent tail descends, the haunches creak away from the tarmac and  into the gateway, and I can put my foot down again. Three hundred yards from where I work I hit another trail of ambling buttocks, and the wheels slowly squelch their way past another early morning farmyard idyll.
I get out, and Ann drives home while I stagger in to earn a few paltry coins to keep us all alive.
The gang is landscaping someone's garden. I get out the canterbury hoe and level the front of a rockery which faces the Shaftesbury road. The girls go by on their way to offices and shops. They are pretty. They get propositioned. The sun grows hot, and the hero takes off his shirt. He strips to his pants which are then covered by the shirt tied around the middle. The hero gets propositioned. Maybe a job in this particular zoo isn't so bad after all.
Lug rocks; push rotovator; trim hedges. The hero likes gardens, and fresh air, but does he want to talk to Bill all day? Does he want to talk to that fool Baker for the next eight hours, and sit and eat his packed lunch in the wagon listening to their problems? Does he want to sit on the veranda under a newly clipped yew looking out across the cyclamen under a large walnut tree to the Polden hills with an old man and a scraggy foul-mouthed youth? Where is the lovely Annabel in her short red skirt and long bouncing hair? Where is Cephren jumping about the lawn like a large butterfly?
Some damn fool is stuck in a box in the zoo. Some fool has got it all wrong. The sun shines from a smooth October sky. The sky is blue and beautiful, but there is a whiff of resentment in the air. There is a song to be written, and a poem to be finished. There is a girl to be kissed, new countries to discover, and arguments to be had. There is music in my head to be danced to. There are new shining buildings in my imagination waiting to be built. There is so much inside that is struggling to get out and shine brightly in the world. Instead I am shifting stones for someone else's rockery.
I straighten up and look across the garden. Any damn fool can shift stones.

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