David Hadley's Blog, page 204

Late Night Tales and Stories

You can, so easily, dance through all the moments of your days, letting the time flow past your movements like some slow languid river that eases the traveller to far distant places only ever heard of in late night tales and stories.

Me? I am merely a teller of such stories. I can weave the words around your movements and conjure devils and demons out of the flames of the camp fires. I can tell of lovers and of princesses I have known. Young women who have followed me away from the dying fires into the darkness and the shadows, once I have told all I can tell.

I have told of monsters and journeys, lovers, wars and misunderstandings. I have tangled and untangled fates and destinies and I have told of what will come to those too young to have seen beyond the distant hills.

I have travelled there, beyond the hills, beyond the valleys, I have crossed deserts and fought through jungles to bring you these tales and one day I will tell the tale of how you came to me to bring me stories in your dances on those days when I thought I had nothing more to tell.

In the Kitchen Holding a Spoon

Still, though, eh?

I mean... well, come on.

Y'know?

As they say, a needle in the hand is worth all the frying pans in the bush before they hatch.

There was a time... well, there were quite a few times, at least in my younger days. But we won't go into that... which wasn't the case at the time, either.

Oh, no....

Back then it was very different indeed, even though some of our fashion choices would seem a bit odd to those who pay attention to such things, we did have quite a time... or – as I said – quite a few times.

However, time happens to us all and it leaves us standing here, usually in the kitchen holding a spoon, and wondering how we got here, where all the time has gone and – most importantly – what did we want the spoon for?

Somewhere at the back of the mind is the sneaking feeling that we may have made a cup of tea at some point and can't remember where we left it.

Or was that yesterday...?

The days seem to slip by so fast, often without even stopping to say hello or make some other mark of their passing. There was a time, way back in childhood when the long summer school holiday seemed to last for years, now it seems the kids are back in uniform only a day or two after those first few days of the holiday. Christmas seems to come every few months and we seem to have more birthdays than the Queen.

Time – who the fuck keeps stealing it all?

Falling like Rain

[...]

The rain was falling heavily as we stepped out of the pub. We huddled close and began to walk. The wind blew the rain hard into our faces. I could feel the dampness seeping through my shirt and through Alison's T-shirt as I held her close to me. She stopped walking and turned to face me, rain trickling down her face. She laughed and kissed me hard on the lips. I picked her up and spun her around in my arms, laughing. I could taste the rain on her lips.

We arrived back at the house soaked and dripping. Alison turned to me, rain running down her face from her hair. 'Have you got a large towel I could use? Mine is probably still soaking wet from this morning.'

'Yes, sure. You go to your room and I'll bring one up.' I turned into my room as Alison climbed the stairs, leaving damp footprints on the carpet.

I quickly changed out of my soaking wet clothes, leaving them lying on the floor, and grabbed a couple of towels. Still fastening my shirt one-handed, I started to climb the stairs. I could hear the wind hammering the rain against the front door.

Alison was standing in front of the wardrobe sorting out some dry clothes when I walked into her room. She was still wearing her soaked T-shirt and jeans. I held out the towel to her. She shook her head, pulled off her T-shirt and dropped it on the floor. She shivered and I saw her nipples harden. She let her jeans drop to the floor.

Naked except for pale blue knickers, she walked towards me. I held out a towel and wrapped it around her. She looked up at me and I kissed her. She took the other towel from me and wrapped her hair in it. I started rubbing her back and shoulders under the towel.

Alison looked over her shoulder at me. She smiled for a moment, then put her hand over mine, stopping its movement. The smile dropped from her face and she looked across the room. She shook her head slowly.

Wrapping the towel around herself, she walked across to the window, leaving me standing in the middle of the room. My hand was still raised as though her shoulder remained beneath it. I let it drop.

'I'll bring the towel down later.' She stared out at the wind and rain lashing the treetops.

I stood for a moment, waiting for some words to come to my lips, but I could think of nothing to say. 'There's no hurry,' I said eventually, and turned to the door.

'Isn't there?' Alison said as the door closed behind me.

[…]

[Extract from Hanging Around Until]

And There You Were... Gone

There is not much time and not much left to say. We had the days, we had the time, but it was all over too soon. The time left us, the reasons why we were there together left us... and then, finally, you left me.

I woke one morning to find you gone. I had half-expected it. For the weeks leading up to that time you had never really been there anyway. It was almost as if we were there together rehearsing your leaving. You withdrew bit-by-bit from our life until all that remained was to physically take yourself away, and there you were... gone.

It took some time to get use to you not being there. I had lived so close to you, so entwined with you, for so long it felt as though I had lost some part of myself. I suppose I had, without you I felt incomplete, unformed. You had given my life its shape and its purpose and your leaving left me lost and unformed.

The days lost their focus without you, just became a jumble of moments heaping up on each other. There was no structure, no purpose and no point. Life became dreamlike, tumbling from one moment to the next without purpose or reason. Day after day fell down like this, until that day when I suddenly woke up.

That was the day when I found the space around me was not an absence of you, but a place of possibility, somewhere where my life could grow and fill again. All I needed was to start living again.

Monday Poem: The Key Collector

The Key Collector

She has so many keys,
collecting them all
since she was a young girl,
to lock her secrets
deep inside her dreams

to keep them all safe
from this heartless world
that leaves so many
young girl's dreams
broken, torn and trodden
on the waterlogged ground.

You Have to Laugh

Still, you have to laugh, don't you?

At least until it dawns upon you that it is indeed yourself that is staring back incredulously from that mirror. Then, you either have to carry on laughing, or start to cry.

No, I don't know what happened either.

One day, it seemed, you were young and... well, if not entirely beautiful, at least the fearful villagers didn't march with flaming torches en-mass to the castle of your creator demanding an end to the abomination.

Then suddenly, it seems only a short while later, you have turned into this... this creature that stares back at you from what obviously must be one of those funfair mirrors that someone has put here as some form of practical joke.

Yes, there is a practical joke, but it is not the mirror.

It is life itself that is the joker playing its cruel tricks of time upon everyone. It is time that is lurking there behind the ajar door giggling at your discomfiture as you despair at the disparity between what you hoped, assumed, you were and the cold reality of that reflection.

It is the weight of those sniggering years that have taken what was once young and firm and turned it into the failed creature that stares forlornly back at you, waiting to be put out of its misery, but you must learn to live with it because the alternative seems much worse... and then, you realise that you were right to laugh in the first place, after all.

Thursday Poem: Unfolding

Unfolding

There were always ghosts in her eyes.
She lived in a room packed full
Of memories, movement and voices.

She would sit, still, in her chair.
A vague wistful smile just touching
The edges of her lips, watching

Her past days unfolding before her.
All she needed was her memory,
That room and a cup of tea.

 

Just Another Love Story

I was never sure if Kim loved me, but I was always sure that she loved my cock. In our early days, I would sit there in my big old green armchair, reading a book, listening to music or just staring off into space and she would curl up on the floor between my legs with her head resting against my thigh next to my cock. She would kiss it and stoke it and rub her cheek along it, much as a cat rubs itself against you when it hurries in from the cold or the rain.

I can remember waking up on those young summer mornings to find her already awake, either sitting up cross-legged in the bed, or lying at some odd angle, my cock in her hand already wide awake and eager to greet her.

Kim would sleep at night, snuggled up close behind me with her arm over me and my cock held tight in her hand, sometimes so tight I had to prise her fingers open one by one if I needed to get up for a piss or something. Then, if I was lying facing her I would wake suddenly to find her sleeping halfway down the bed, her hands resting under the side of her head as she lay facing me, my cock resting on her arm and her slow, even, breath blowing across my cock, her lips touching, almost kissing it.

During the day, several times a day, Kim would, whenever she could, take my cock in her mouth and suck it with the intensity and concentration of a hungry baby desperate for the breast. It seemed to bring her that same comfort that the baby got too, often falling easily into a contented sleep once she'd got her fill.

She would ride it, too, as though it was some kind of magical steed riding some fairy tale princess to a distant magical land only she could believe in.

When it was over, and she was satisfied, she would open her eyes and look down at me as though I was someone come to meet her at some train station, airport or dock as she returned home from her travels to some exotic far-off distant country that lay somewhere deep within her orgasms. She would be distant, hesitant, even somewhat formal, as though I was some third person, some outsider trying to come between her and her cock.

I knew then, even in the early days, that one day Kim would set off to find that far distant country she visited, only for a while, in her orgasms and that she would leave the cock behind when she realised she could never take it with her on her journeys far deeper than I could ever go.

I could see it in Kim's eyes that morning when she kissed my cock good-bye, that she was going, going forever and not coming back, and that my cock would have to learn to live, like me, alone.

The Mystical Priest of the Beat

 

The throbbing beating brain-numbing noise was almost solid enough to touch. The noise used as music in clubs like this was too loud to be music, too primal to be music, too crude to be music; a noise stripped of almost all its possibilities of becoming music. It was music beaten up, raped, buggered, pissed on and left for dead with its lifeblood oozing out of it and running down the drain with each pulsebeat.

Pete loved it now.

He was dancing, with a half-full bottle of Champagne in each hand. Dancing – or so he thought – like a shaman, like a witch doctor. He was the mystical priest of the beat. He was primal too. He was savage. He was base. He was Dionysus.

The lights throbbed and pulsed showing then concealing the smiling, laughing, grinning coterie he - or rather, his recently discovered valid credit card – had gathered. He had disciples. He was the pied piper, the pied pissed-up prankster that would lead his gang of grinning cavorting lovelies to a new, higher paradise.

'Wsdsd…FGGFvmm…? HGTffvbb!'

'What?' Pete jammed his ear up against the mouth of… whatever her name was.

'XXXXZXzzzzzz! Quuallll! Tits?'

In the briefest of silences in the noise, Pete was sure that he had heard the word 'tits'. He nodded his head enthusiastically. 'Tits, yes!' he yelled grinning down at the items in question. He was almost sure she had only the normal complement, but there seemed to be far more than just two in there. However, she proved his notion of the conventional correct when she whipped her top off and shook both of them in Pete's face.

'Yum! Yum!' Pete shouted, watching mesmerised, as they performed a slow-motion gravity-defining dance all of their own.

The rest of his entourage had now noticed that one of their number had managed to monopolise the attention of their platinum-credit-card wielding sugar daddy. So, in the spirit of good old free enterprise they too decided that a revealing of their own not-inconsiderable assets would be a way of restoring some balance to the proceedings.

By this time, Pete was already seeing double – if not triple – the sudden avalanche of naked mammaries bouncing and undulating for his delectation was almost too much for him to cope with. He stopped his cavorting and took a step back.

Unfortunately, his backwards motion brought him into contact with the almost full pint held by one of a group of young men. The men were already feeling more than a touch aggrieved that this bloke – at least old enough to be their father – was monopolising so much female attention seemingly through the mere fact of being significantly wealthier than all of them put together.

'Oi! Cunt. Watch it.'

Pete heard and turned. He grinned. 'Sorry, mate. It's getting a bit crowded in here isn't it?' He gestured behind him towards the undulating mammorial tide that was threatening to engulf them all.

'Are you taking the piss?'

'What? No.'

'Hey Jimmy, this old cunt is taking the piss, as well as all the birds.'

Jimmy and the rest of the gang began to circle around Pete. Even in his befuddled state, Pete could recognise that things were beginning to get ugly. As the circle closed around him, he could see the girls edged out one by one. But still the first punch to the side of his head took him by surprise.

Pete staggered back into the men who had moved around behind him. They pushed him forward once more. It was over twenty years since Pete and Johnny had to fight their way out of an Austin bar. Since then Pete had not had to raise a fist in anger. Despite this, he knew he was easily able to handle half a dozen or so blokes who were probably over twenty years his junior. He raised his fists, noticing that he still held the two – now empty – champagne bottles.

'Hmm… useful,' Pete Muttered. He could feel that his mouth was already starting to swell up. He raised the bottles and took up a martial arts pose.

There was a whirling blur and the man directly in front of Pete collapsed. One of the topless girls took his place. The way she was swinging her lethal looking handbag around her head caused all the young men to turn in her direction. They gazed, mesmerised by her breasts and the slow, almost, leisurely way they developed independent orbits around her upper body.

Two more of the men fell, handbagged from behind be Pete's tribe of vengeful amazons. Pete lowered his bottles and just stared as the gang fell one by one. Out of the corner of his eye, Pete just noticed the handbag bouncing off the shaven head of one of his attackers and heading towards him.

'Wat…!'

There was pain. He fell. It went dark.

[….]

[An extract from Dance on Fire: a novel]

Like a Life put on Hold

There are things unsaid, left there like some invisible object we know is there, but cannot touch for fear of some sharp hot shock. Each of us walks warily around it, sensing the danger and fearing the consequences. Deep within each of us there is the unpleasant hope that if someone is going to stumble into the invisible and set it all off then let it not be me, let it be the other one. We go treading warily around this same room where all our future possibilities lie under these dust sheets like a life put on hold.

There was a time when we could have danced together, oblivious, through this room. A time when there was no invisible presence inhibiting our every move and every word. There was a time when this room held our future bright in the sunlight streaming in through breeze-blown curtains at the open window.

Now the curtains are closed and the furniture is draped in mourning. This door is kept closed in case that invisible object that fills the space inside should somehow spread and grow out into the rest of our lives; in case it should spread and grow until it fills every inch of our days. Growing until we have nowhere else to go and nothing else to do but turn together and face it.