David Hadley's Blog, page 153

The Sensual Art of Ping-Pong

I suppose it all began with the ping-pong bats. She got that look in her eye and started feeling my ping-pong balls in what can only be described as an overly-sensual manner. She ran her finger along the top of the table tennis net as the tip of her tongue echoed the movement across her upper lip.

‘Have you…’ she breathed. ‘…got any mayonnaise?’

I gulped and then stepped over to the fridge. I held the jar up for her as she suggestively sauntered over to the fridge and took out a fresh bunch of celery.

‘We could,’ she said as she stroked my chest with the leafy ends of the celery. ‘have a break… know what I mean?’ She squeezed my ping-pong balls firmly in her other hand.

Putting the balls down, she gestured for me to open the jar as she broke off a stick of celery. She dunked it in the jar and then stepped even closer to me. ‘I want to lick your mayonnaise off the tip,’ she whispered, then demonstrated with the celery.

I felt my knees go weak as she ran her free hand down my body. She turned and picked up one of the table tennis bats. ‘Do you…’ she said, looking up at me from under half-closed eyes, ‘think it was very naughty of me to win the last game?’

I gulped and nodded.

‘Perhaps….’ she said, swinging the bat though the air and hitting the side of her thigh. ‘…perhaps you think I ought to be punished?’

‘Yes..’ I managed to say. ‘Yes you should be punished.’

So I took the celery and the mayonnaise off her and shut the fridge. ‘Tonight,’ I said in my sternest voice. ’Tonight there will be no Downton Abbey for you!’ Turning in triumph I strode out of the room, remembering to tuck my ping-pong balls back into my shorts as I left, congratulating myself on getting it right at last as I heard her yelp of frustration as the door closed behind me.

Precarious Holiday Perambulations

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It was not easy – at the time – which, considering the powerful grip she has got on such occasions is not really that much of a surprise. However, she did - in the end – propose to let go unless I – in turn – promised to see my way clear to tidying out the shed.

Once that was resolved to her satisfaction, she helped me climb back up the cliff to the relative safety of the footpath. I did think of asking why she had chosen a walk along a cliff-edge footpath this late in the evening, and during a howling gale, but then I looked at her and thought better of it. For all I know, she could have me insured and just saved me from falling to my certain death in the pounding waves below because she has always felt that wearing black doesn’t ‘suit her’. An attitude I have tried – so far without success – to change every time she wears the frogman’s wet suit on our ‘special’ Tuesday evenings when the kids are out setting fire to the neighbours.

Still, as we made our way back to the relative shelter of our cliff-top caravan she did assure me that when I had questioned why she was apparently sawing through my safety rope a few minutes earlier, as I dangled over the void, she was merely ‘tidying up a few frayed threads’ and not - despite the evil glint I caught in her eye when the moon made one of its fitful appearances from behind the heavy clouds – planning my demise.

‘After all,’ she wisely pointed out later.’ Without you there, how else would I warm up my ice cold feet in bed at night?’

So, all-in-all, in the end I had to concede she did indeed have a point, after all.

Thursday Poem: Regal

Regal

Her fingers grip this world so carelessly,
a day is lost as easily as her word
all left to fall to the dirt or grass,
or float away down gutter and drains.

On she dances through all her days
towards the possibility of all her
elaborate dreams and those fairy tales
she knows are bound to come true.

So she constructs castles and towers
high above the roofs of the town
that she sees as little more than
a dark shadow across her faraway eyes.

She ignores the men calling out to her
promising her something far less
than her visions of romance can give her
as her due, and the smiles she bestows

on their every awkward gesture or phrase
are not the promises they think they are,
but the indulgent whims of a princess
for the crude obsequiousness of her subjects.

Games People Play

It was not that easy, after all donkeys, by their very nature, are recalcitrant beasts, added to that, the natural fear of any mortal being when confronted by a potential predator – and as everyone who has ever survived a Christmas dinner will know – Brussels sprouts do have lethal tendencies. The donkey as a veteran of more up-market Children’s nativity plays than it ever dared remember was – quite naturally, therefore, more than a little perturbed by anything redolent of the festive season – up to and including traditional vegetable accompaniments.

However, such was the urgency in the situation – which I’m sure doesn’t need much explanation, except to confirm that the lady in question did, indeed, have a temper if left to seethe - it was best we all thought to do our best to find something without yuletide connotations to fill up the donkey’s basket.

I suppose really we should have made more of an attempt to source some tools and other materials more closely associated with gold-prospecting in the Californian gold rush era, but she had sprung the idea on us at what was almost the last minute.

I further suppose it was therefore inevitable that, when a number of injuries resulting from our last neighbourhood game of Strip Twister left many of us feeling we were not up to another bout, there would be a modicum of scepticism when presented with her new idea for a way of breaking the ice at our next… er… intimate evening.

But – surprisingly enough to many of us there that evening – her suggestion of playing Strip-Buckeroo with a live donkey and real accoutrements did turn out to be far more entertaining than some of the more pessimistic predictions suggested. Although, they were right about having a great deal to clean up afterwards, after having a perpetually-surprised – and somewhat already nervous – donkey in the living room, an attribute the makers seem to have surprisingly overlooked in the original game.

There is No Present like Time

There is, they often say, no time like the present. Alison, though, said: ‘There is no present like time.’

It was my birthday, and Alison had quite a present for me. It was her, in her birthday suit, lying there on my bed when I got back home from the office. At the time, I didn’t wonder how she had managed to get into my flat, or any detail like that, because when Alison was there I forgot everything else, especially when she had also forgotten to wear anything.

‘What do you mean,’ I said later, when she gave me a chance to get my breath back. She had got up from the bed and was walking, still in her birthday suit, back towards it, out of the kitchen, with a birthday cake. The cake had a single candle on it, the flame flickering as she walked, humming the ‘Happy Birthday’ song under her breath.

‘What? When?’ she said, placing the cake down on the bed between us.

‘There is no present like time. What did that mean?’

‘Oh,’ she said, feeding me a slice of cake, then offering me her breast to lick where a dollop of soft icing had fell on its upper curve. ‘Time…. That is your present. When would you like to go?’

‘After the cake, or do you mean where would I like to go?’

‘No,’ she said, scooping up a large dollop of the cake cream on her one finger while with her other hand she pulled back the sheet and reached for me. She looked from my mouthed ‘yes’ to her cream-smothered finger and then to what she held in her other hand. Then she smiled that smile of hers and licked her lips.

I gulped as the cold cream touched me.

Alison said. ‘No, I do mean when do you want to go, not where.’ Then her mouth was too full to speak and I lost all interest in everything else for quite a while.

Monday Poem: Skin like Honey

Skin like Honey

All my desires are for the dreams of flesh
all made of warm, alive and breathing skin.
I think of silver and I think of gold
I think of moments when and think of moments
where time becomes a place to move inside
and where a day is all we have to hold
so now we use it slowly, carefully
our time is like  sweet honey, thick and gold
its slowness falling all around our lives.

My days all lie in piles around me now
I think of how it once was, when we had
such honey days and she had such soft skin
it seemed as though she was the summer, warm
unclouded with her eyes of understanding
she saw though to the centre, holding it
there, still and serene in the open palm
of her one hand. But now, I do not know
this person standing in my life and dreaming
my dreams and sorting through these memories
of long ago. It is not me or now.

Possessed, I’m haunted as I walk alone,
this ghost will move my hand to reach towards
the memory of her. If I could break
and twist away from this procession, back
away from times where anything beyond
is either haunting dream or memory,

each with less weight than any hand can hold,
as insubstantial now as every lie
she whispered. None of this can alter, change
the past or anything and none of this
will ever matter as we leave no words

or shadows carved into these rocks. We leave
behind us nothing of those times and soon
it will be gone and none of those lost times
remain as memories we shared between
us, like the steps in a familiar dance
as we went round and then around again.

A Time of Leaving

She stood over by the window, looking out on a part of the world that she would probably never see again.

The time had come for leaving, but she felt reluctant. She had not, she felt, had a great childhood here in the Tower of her parents. It had been a cold, distant childhood. A time of nurses and tutors and seeing her parents only infrequently, then often only in their ceremonial robes at the end of some great hall where the family had to adopt formal manners and rigid poses as some interminable duty was performed. Often, she suspected, the rituals were as mysterious and unintelligible to everyone else present as it was to her, except, of course, the High Priests. Jemilah believed the High Priests were the only ones who understood the ancient texts and rituals, but only as a way of continuing their power and influence over the life of the Tower and its lands, rather than any great belief in the supposed gods and the divine rights and duties of her family.

Now, though, Jemilah could hear the marching step of her escort, their heavy measured tread echoing around the stone walls of the corridor that led to her room.

Sighing, she turned from the window and prepared herself for the rest of her life.

Coming for Her

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She waited for me to come to her. She knew I would come, that I would find her, even though the place she found herself in was no place she had ever known before. She did not know me, of course, just that I was possible. It was a world where such things were possible, even though she had not seen enough of it to know that.

Still, she said, she knew that I would come.

She said too, that when she managed a few hours of troubled sleep in that strange place she’d found herself, that she saw me in her dreams searching for her. She saw me wandering the dark twisting corridors with a flaming torch in my hands, as I searched for the woman who had come to me in my dreams.

She seemed to understand when I said I knew as little about the place we found ourselves in as she did. That I had managed to find a way out of my room, my cell, my prison, and I had walked the endless dark corridors for many days and nights looking for the woman that haunted my dreams and called out to me whenever I slept.

What she didn’t know, though, was that I was lying to her: I was no prisoner I was the gaoler.

The Course of Justice

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It was not – as many of the people who later gave witness statements for the prosecution attested – as straightforward an event as it first seemed. This is especially true when you consider that the prosecution’s lead witness was not only unsighted for most of the time the alleged incident was taking place, this witness was also a grey squirrel; a species notorious for their willingness to attempt to subvert the course of justice in return for a handful of nuts and some tail-care beauty products.

Not only that, the CCTV was – as in so many cases of this nature - both ambiguous and of a quality so poor that even the TV news programmes preferred to use reconstructions of the alleged incident, rather than rely on footage that would only otherwise be suitable for use by a top-flight director for a prestige prize-winning drama series on late-night BBC4 with an audience numbered in the tens.

What is more, the accused when she appeared in the witness box, was – to the complete surprise of the jury – young, attractive (but not too attractive for the female jurors to take an instant dislike to her) and from a respectable family and post code. She was therefore – despite what the evidence said – obviously not guilty, and already had the incipient book-deal with a reputable publisher of celebrity biographies that would not only prove her innocence, but also expose corruption in the police investigation, the MPs involved in drafting the law she was alleged to have broken as well as the shady involvement of some rogue elements of the secret service of one of this country’s most trusted allies.

So, in the end it was no wonder the judge – after an hour-long meeting in his chamber with the accused that left him hot and sweaty under his wig and his robes strangely askew – acquitted her of all charges and allowed her to walk free from the court without a stain on her character, but with only a small one on her skirt.

Thursday Poem: Roads, Routes and Maps

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Roads, Routes and Maps

This road, the distance, and you and I here
with all those roads we travelled, standing still
we do not know now all we need to know
to find which way to turn, and stumbling on
towards another crossroads up ahead.

It’s hard to tell, and hard to say just why
we both should not have taken this one route.
We stand apart now, here and either side
of our old half-torn map, both looking off
away down different new turning roads
that lead away from this last point we share.

And shall I stand and watch you walk away,
with half-torn map in hand, as you go down
that road, until it turns you out of sight?
Or, shall I strike off down another road?
My torn half-share of our outworn old map

held ever tighter in my clutching hand
as I go striding onward without pause
or turning to look back, to see a glimpse
of you, when changes in the landscape turn
our twisting routes towards each other’s path
to bring us one day back to meet again.