Published 'Urges' 1995

 

 

Muck and dust.

 

Sally had never seen anything quite like it—but, David having bought the place upon the risk of a guided whim, she agreed with him that they needed to pull out all the stops to get the building renovated for the next season ... otherwise, as David maintained, their nurtured dreams of life bursting skyward upon golden wings would be grounded in gravel.  He shrugged his shoulders, as if he knew he was a poet as well as a businessman.

 

Not that Sally or David were dreamers at heart.  David certainly had a core of reality, hardened by impoverished bouts of overheating and freezing-over, stretching right back to before the time whence he could recover memories.  Sally, however, had been reared with the big people on the big people's side of the track, that area of castellated riches which overlooked the crowded cottages where David's family had pecked their grit and flapped their stubby arms.  Yet, she was now destined to shed her velvet skirts and become accustomed to overgrown sidings, as it were, having herself abandoned the fast track—by marrying David ... against her parents' earnest wishes.  They'd said David would never be nearly man enough for their daughter, at which statement David had laughed.  He vowed to be embody two men: one with brute force to gut her deep; the other to preen and pamper her feathers. 

 

The derelict property was now their chance to better themselves: turning it into an inn which, if they played their cards right, would become an eventual chain of guest houses, hostelries and, yes, those tall joints, where big men paid through their noses for doubtful dormitories and à-la-carte caresses. 

 

It was indeed a demolition's delight—on the outskirts of town ... when David and Sally first viewed it.  On the market for its land value only; to their eyes concrete poetry.  Yet, even at its relatively low asking price, David knew that he and Sally hadn't got the readies nor, for that matter, the provenance as a person with purchase pulling-power.

 

Even with the painstakingly prepared business plan and inside information which David presented, his bank manager's answer was a slow swing of his heavy-duty prayer-beads in tune with a shake of the shaven head, accompanied by a sickly smile.  David's wings were not only ruffled but decidedly clipped, as he swung through the doors of the bank shrugging as high as shrugs could go.  He'd show them.  He not only had in mind the bank manager, when he said this, but also Sally’s parents who had disowned her for marrying a mere man from the wrong side of the downside track.  That was surely the one reason why they shouldn't have disowned her ... whatever their ulterior motives.  The last thing Sally needed, with David as her husband, was being plucked off the well-mulched family tree.

 

Still, no accounting for humanity.  Humans couldn't help their nature, could they?  He should know. 

 

 

 

Well, he managed to settle a few ancient scores with once back-slapping streetwise sidekicks—eventually amassing for himself sufficient wherewithal to buy the ramshackle inn-in-abeyance.  The inside information—from one of his boyhood chums now made good and living on the right side of the upside track— indicated that the precinct containing the property was about to be developed as an Earth theme park—where an inn with rough edges would indeed be in.

 

 

Muck and dust.

 

Sally was aghast when she saw the tumbledown horse-hive that David intended to make into an inn.  

 

“David ... this stable's real unsteady," she said with her customary understatement and a feeling for the cut of words.

 

He faced her, took her shoulders and tilted her towards him as he planted a kiss on her forehead.  There was nobody in the vicinity—the Land Agent having left his prospects to their own self-devious devices—and David pushed a hand under her blouse.

 

"Incorrigible!" she said, with a smile.

 

It was not as if their nights were expended sleeping off all the hours God gave to darkness.  David had these unclocked urges, however, that couldn't be predicted, even when a valve had already released a head of steamy lava from his volcano of libido that very morning.

 

Sally was accustomed to this, even enjoying his endless sex-madness most of the time.  Yet there were awkward occasions ... in public places ... when she was too tired ... or sinking beneath a monthly tidal surge ... or all of them, like today.

 

"Come on, Sally," urged David, recognising her smile as a sign of opposition.  The best times were when she fended him off.  Mock rapes were the greatest aphrodisiac as far as David was concerned.  Her screaming "Keep Out—Trespassers will be prosecuted!" was a veritable come-on.  However, her sweet smile tended to burst the passion at its swollen source.  A strange love affair.

 

She plucked off his fingers, one by one—before they had the opportunity to peel the bra-cup from the give of her left breast.

 

But, for once, her manufactured smile was forced back into the teeth by the relentless pressure of his lips—cheeks spiked with shadow.  Followed by the automatic caressing of his bulging pouch.  Feeling the wings unfurl.

 

This was no ordinary couple's rôle-playing to spice up their love-play—when pleas-to-stop ceased to be acting and became for real—the spice scorching the backs of throat ... acid tongues seeking quenchment beyond each other.  Misunderstandings rife—neither party knowing if the other was still acting ... or bluffing ... even, double-bluffing.  That was as nothing, however, when the rôles reversed—mounts changed midstream—up various creeks without paddles—craft docking amid the blood-soaked thermals—switch-backing ... thrashing, neighing, snickering, champing at the bit—a huge swollen aileron—spinning, spinning crabwise, widdershins, in the crimson welkin—then, a second aileron which at first failed to steady them.

 

 

 

Sally unplugged herself from Pegasus' spread remains.  If low-down creatures like David had suspected what women from the upside of the track were really like, she thought, he would have taken her parents’ assertion more seriously—that she needed twice the man the likes of him.  She needed more than merely a wing and a prayer.

 

The bank manager, who’d slipped surreptitiously into shot, took one look at the caved-in walls, collapsed floorboards and riven roofs—all forming a rudimentary cone. He smiled and took Sally into his arms. They had simply needed that nugget of inside information from the downside and could now make the clip-joint into a mock Mount Etna, to match its peeled pyramid shape. All the rage in drinking-holes, with its henges of rubble and blunt bluffs oozing with blood-rich lava flows.  Fuck and lust.