THE DOCK by YVONNE SILVER

She laid her nakedness upon him as the sun beat down, the ice cold of the water clinging to her hips, and he was with the abuser in his home. The day had been like a postcard dream, an impossible shaping of a moment too simple to experience, the beauty too subtle to a city-brain. Traffic and buildings clinging to the intellect like a moth to a flame, flapping the calm and sensitive reflection into the complex and overblown. A child leaning out of a window smoking at night as the wind blows leaves up and down the gutter. A shallow breath, he waited. Waited for some moment to break the sun, holding her body limply, cursing the distance between sensation and reality for one locked in a book, hammered through with nails into the table below. She looks up and the gold locks fluttered as the grey blue hills faded into mist behind, light blazing off the midday sea. It's her birthday.

A few blessed weeks earlier in a fit of terror she had called, a kitten had tried to enter the shop she guarded in the empty hillside village. ‘No animals allowed’ was her solitary instruction. She had been given a misting bottle with a mix of water and vinegar to spray in the eyes of the kitten to train it to stay away, but late at night when it entered, tiny and weak, she had stood over it spraying half the bottle at the tiny creature; curled up accepting the gentle torture as a penance for company. The girl collapsed from the cruelty. When the cat returned days later she simply picked it up and threw it into the dark street. The call had come that night as she sat in the solitary darkness hearing the sound of the stray dogs outside barking with rage at the discovery.

The mountain range raged around the island, Chicago blasting from the speakers. The breeze on his elbow felt good as the cigarette sped down to the port. The boy returned to his bed and curled up for sleep, consciously planning how he would levitate. She smiled quietly. Her family around the table lying about the past, simmering silence quietly fleshing out unanswered questions as to why things were. The father an ugly kindness and the green glided past as a flick book of leaves. Looking up from the mattress in the park through the trees he accepted the mouth around him for the first time with the taste of smoke in his mouth and a fresh bursting in his groin, colours and shapes swirling in his vision and the future bursting to life in front of him, kaleidoscopic.

Little families scattered the deck, slurping down on cheap coffee and biscuits, as they gently stormed across the gulf. Feet up and with music in his ears he rode the classics, hunting down Achilles and Helena in a flight of fancy braver than he had expected. As he absorbed the book below him the adventure made the nerves in his face tingle. A fat man next to him rotated his body, riding a buttock gently up to release to the air. The woman leaning on the rails shifted the weight across her hips, her tanned neck arched away from him. The rows of screwed-down seats inside strewn with unconscious bodies cheating the day. The ferry finally entered the gap between the breast-like volcanic hills, towards it's destination.

"You have been to Jerusalem," she said. Half crazed and cuddled over her legs, clinging to the polystyrene cup. "But, where?"

"In Israel," he replied, his eyes squinted at this petrified woman who had interrupted his solitude in the tiny airport in Palm Springs, after a week of burning heat and aggressive sexual urges floating in pools. "I don't have a passport," and so proceeding a story from the thirty-something, broken and wounded, of life in one town, one place, one church and one view, with little education, an enforced marriage and an abusive husband, a Christian yearning fostered by years of peace at church, as respite from the cruelty of all the homes she had ever lived in. The acceptance that life was cruel seeped from her and the awestruck shock in her eyes that she had met someone who had been to Jerusalem, a remote mythical place she had read of, was like watching a child peeling an un-flowered green pod to discover the wet but gently curled petals of a yellow flower. "You should see it, all the bricks of yellow, there are laws to how the city grows."

Morning came to the boy with the sickly smell of his own urine and the promise of school. "I have something in my pocket for you," he promised the 7 year old sat next to him in maths, only for her disgust and delight to please him during lunch break. Beautiful stories; spilling from his pen unappreciated by his bastard teacher. Games, childhood games, wrapped up in sexual discovery and perverse simplicity, playing with her knickers and idly fumbling idiotically. "I'm complex and fickle," she said that night, as they grasped each other and he later climbed into her bed locked behind the nighttime bookshelves. Curling up beside her and gently placing his hand on the shallow skin between belly and hip bone, laying still in waiting, inches from the taut elastic, he moved to gently touch in quiet but obvious invitation, which she accepted with the gentlest of movements, arching her body and gliding his hand into soft hair.

The Long Island dock was silent as they sat splashing their feet, as things slowly changed, rotating their connection. Things moved within him that brought a sickening taste of disgust to his lips, thoughts of violence towards a big burly man who threw his weight around with ugly abandon. He would challenge him in his work place, amongst his underlings.

"You are not the fucking boss of me you fat ugly cunt of a man."

He would shame him for his deceit and money-grabbing habits, he would challenge him to hit him; hit him in front of his workforce. And, once goaded, with witnesses, he would claim self defence, cite the size difference, the screaming, and with the law on his side attack him. Break him, crash him through the office furniture and smash his pig-like ugly fucking face till he lay bleeding at his feet, the stunned eyes of those around him immediately reminding him, even in fantasy, that this would never happen.

And the time distance burnt, sucked out all the joy, the lightness, the desperate longing he required to stay on top of all the disquiet and anger within him. Vinegar burnt his eyes, the postcard rotting in a drawer, love notes scrawled on the back ignored and unnoticed, the cigarette yellowing his knuckles, and she cried. Lying in the sweaty, cum-soaked bed, overlooking the Ganges, in a city of burning flesh and psychotic fundamentalist Hindus hellbent on knocking him over in their disgusting shit-coated streets, brown urea dripping down his legs, Ganesha teasing him, goading his too easily inflamed ego. She wailed for her lost dream and safety, for the beauty they had which he had destroyed by bringing the boy into their lives. He would burn down the room.

Her arms rested below his head, cold and clammy, on the dock, her wet hair like seaweed on his chest, his warmth in her, and he smiled. 


Original image by Virtual Photography Studioa, some rights reserved.