Three Dont Tango 4

Morning comes. The sun shines through the jumbled strands of leaves of the birch trees rustling just outside our bedroom window. It also shines through the jumbled hair of Annabel as she lies sleeping beside me.
The bed is hot. Her flesh is hot. I slowly slide my leg up her leg. I feel her hot skin. Fingers stroke, moving carefully, along, up and round, sliding over smooth flesh, feeling tendons flickering. Lips touch, feel across, along warm stomach, a moth's wings darting over the magical electric surface, ruffling eddies of warm aura. Lips are seeking the surge of strange energies emanating from the stretch of skin. Fingers are kissing with such slight touch like feathers brushing the tiny electrodes zinging under the skin. I am stealing Annabel's aura. I am plugging into her electrodes, and creaming off her energy, re-energising my batteries. I am stealing power from the sleeping girl.
Morning has come. It is wide-awake day again. I am lying on my side. Now Annabel is standing on the rug peering at herself in the mirror. She nudges out her breasts, sticks out her bottom, twists a leg, twirls herself about and peers into her face. She is almost ready to meet the new day. She is almost ready to come out and say hello.
She puts on her bra, and her breasts disappear behind black lace. The pink-white shows through, her nipples make a dent in the fabric. She pulls on her panties, pale green this morning. She glances again in the mirror. Yes, she can say hello. She smiles, turns to look at me as I lie on my side, amongst a mountain of heaped-up bedclothes watching her. Her face is filled with morning sunshine. Her eyes are blue, so full of the morning sky as she leans down to kiss me.
I touch the soft breasts before me, the waist, the silky slide of underwear, and down her legs. We kiss. The whole burst of the new day is in that instinctive gesture, and something too of the long horizon of woods and hills going on and on forever into the distance: that ineffable distance that I touch lightly as if I am really touching it, but know I cannot grasp. I am touching something akin to the scent of a flower. I smooth my lips down inside the black lace and kiss a breast.
Her head is bent over me, her fingers lightly touching my shoulders, and curling up under my hair. I know she is smiling like a goddess watching her world unfold as my nose burrows around inside her bra like a bee in a flower goblet, and my hands smooth their way across the pale green, silky green, and stroke and squeeze, and then suddenly there is the real squeeze as we fall into the pile of bedclothes, and the whole world is hot volcano of flesh and flesh, and struggle and tearing and bursting red fiery clouds and molten lava.

Annabel buttons up her blouse, pulls on her red miniskirt, and goes down to start breakfast. I struggle out of the tangle of bedclothes and search for my clothes.
Downstairs Annabel is persuading Cephren to eat his breakfast without dropping it on every surface in sight.
I get dressed slowly and wander downstairs. We are a small family sitting together. I tuck into bacon and eggs. Annabel reads her newspaper while Cephren plays with bricks on the floor and tugs at feet under the table. I flick through my copy of Gardening Week and make notes.
It is just another chapter of happy families.

It is the afternoon. Upstairs Annabel is painting a blue house in amongst trees.
You can't see the house. There is a forest of blue trees hiding it. In the middle of this forest is a vortex, darker at the edges, getting bluer and less dark towards the middle, and then less blue and lighter to an almost yellow-white blue at the centre, where the drawing room light shines through the windows into the wood. The house is visible only because the reflective glow from the window is glinting on the trees. Annabel blows fixative through a small blow-pipe, covering the picture with white, which gradually dries clear and shining.
We buy some framing, mitre it, and bang in pins, and frame the new picture. Annabel now has another painting to hang on the wall.
The lady painter joins the Hertford Art Society. Being a happy family her friend goes too, despite the obvious fact that he cant paint.
Another lady takes off her thick fur coat to reveal that she is naked. She lies on the couch, and we stare hard at her, wondering how to make this body come alive on our sheets of paper. Her skin is blotchy, not quite white, not quite consistent. Her flesh is ageing with the lines and colours of time.
Annabel draws quickly. The figure grows on the couch. I draw, and erase, and draw again, but no matter how I try I cannot get her body to flow in the right way. There are no curves that go together, only separate lines which fold like envelopes.
It is coffee time, and the lady puts on her fur coat and comes to look at twenty ladies on twenty couches. I apologise for the mess I have made of her.
She smiles as she looks in the twisting mirror of my page. Crazy mirrors at the end of the pier. Is this really how we see the world? Do we see anything straight? Is everything viewed through crazy lenses? And how do we interpret the jagged lines we see? Through more crazy mirrors?
The coffee break over, she takes off her coat and lies down again. Twenty pencils are struggling with twenty different ladies on a couch.
I don't know what I learned, other than the obvious fact that it is difficult to draw a lady in the nude lying on a couch.

The art society has its annual exhibition. Annabel's blue picture of a blue house in blue trees is exhibited, and hangs on the wall of the Corn Exchange for all to see.
"Now I like this one."
"Which one's that?"
"This blue picture here."
"What is it?"
"Don't you know?"
"It looks like a tangle of blue snakes and things on a blue background."
"Don't you like it?"
"It says here the title is 'House in Trees'. Where is the house? I cant see it."
"Right in the middle there."
"What, that yellow bit?"
"Now I really like that. It's the first painting that's really taken my fancy."
"Ummm, it's all right I suppose."
"No, that appeals to me, I like it."

On tuesday evenings we get into our nice new car and drive to Stevenage to the poetry meetings run by Eric.
Eric lives half way up a Stevenage skyscraper. An aged lady comes from Barnet. Three hippies trundle over from the other side of town. One very serious boy comes from down the road, and there is Annabel and me, and a few other earnest souls.
"And here is a poem I wrote last year about a trip I did to the Lake District for my holidays."
As we are all very serious we listen very seriously. There are no slides.
No holiday slides?
No, just holiday poems.
Eric reads us a poem about ballet dancers doing their morning exercises. They are all at the bar in their ballet tights looking 'sexless as milk bottles'.
We go home again. We are pleased with ourselves. Now we must do even better. We drive home in our limousine, bought for pennies. We park it on a hill because the battery is dodgy, but we are young, and we don't care about such silly little things.
Everything is wonderful. The hero and the heroine are free. They are going out tonight. They have their own car. They have friends. They are young. They are bright and clever. They have discovered the world is theirs, and the world is wonderful. They can drive to another field, another street, another stretch of beach, roll down a hill, pee behind the hedge, make love on a windy beach, and jump over driftwood.
Hey, isn't this fun? We are out tonight. Covent Garden theatre, up in the gods. The ladies are dressed in brightly coloured dresses and silk scarves, their coats draped across seats, while the orchestra is tuning up, the violins swirling up and down, flutes testing with little runs of melody, and a few trumpet blares.
The lights go down, the conductor appears, there is a brief round of applause like a starting pistol, and they're off with the opening chords. There follows the rich sonorities of serious drama. Romeo and Juliet are about to meet and fall in love, then meet to marry, then part to die. The Capulets and the Montagues come on. They fight. In dances Romeo to a spatter of applause. Annabel has her glasses trained on him. She is smiling. There is a fight. There is a death. The big guy comes on and waves his arms about, and a stiff forced gesture of good will is effected. The act ends.
The lights go down. What is going on? Death of Tybalt: spectacular. Death of Romeo: depressing. Death of Juliet: resignation settles in. The ballet closes. The spotlights hug the curtain. The audience is excited. Now is their turn to put on a performance. They stand, they stamp, they clap, in unison, in phase, haphazardly. Romeo comes forward. There is a hoarse shout from the stalls, and he bows as shower upon shower of flowers rain down from the boxes or are thrown up from the stalls. Then Juliet appears, and the flowers keep falling, while the noise is deafening.*
Eventually the clapping has to stop, and the audience has to go home, and Annabel and her guy walk to a tiny Indian restaurant close to Leicester Square and study the menu.
"Last time we had a bhindi ghosht. Let's have a chicken vindaloo this time."
In the train going home I keep wiping the edges of my mouth where the burns still tingle.

In the morning Annabel leaves for work at eight fifteen.
Half an hour later I leave on my bike for my silly job.
Cephren goes to play with a little boy down the road for three mornings a week. Annabel is home for two days each week painting, and being a happily married lady.

It is evening. Annabel sits by the fire, exercise book on her lap. She is wearing her red corduroy skirt and white tights. She is muttering "silly boy", and other sundry remarks to the books on her lap.
There is a boy lying on the floor staring into the firelight and dreaming of all the things he'll do one day. He turns. Annabel is muttering again. He looks up, touches a white leg, his eyes range underneath a red skirt, and he idly stares. He doesn't want to go anywhere. He doesn't really want to do anything. He is full of energy, yes. He is full of ideas, yes; but there is something dragging him back. There is something so soporific about marriage. It is like a bottle of wine. It is so easy to drink, so pleasant to taste, and the dreams flow until you doze as the alcohol drugs you into believing all is well.
They go to bed early, and she giggles and jumps about in the bed. They are happily married, and they sleep soundly side by side.
Ah! Happy families!


* I turned this event into a poem. When I do my poetry readings, this is the one everybody asks me to read.
Here's a link to the online version: https://youtu.be/Hb4fLsIskRM

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