A big box of chocolates which, in my mood, didn’t last long at all. My canal-faring days were over; my lover, quite naturally, had vanished the same moment that the chocolates appeared. Nothing unnatural about that. How many men sail off into the night and leave behind a confectionery surrogate?
And all because the gentleman loves a good surrogate… I gobbled them up quicker than I had the prawn, hidden on my knees on his poop deck.
Then came the lady with the fruit. She stepped straight out of the Pre-Raphaelite catalogue. I was secretly ashamed at whatever unconscious desires I had, through her apparition, articulated. I felt I was somehow denigrating women with this stereotypical flame-haired beauty, recumbent on the sort of marble flooring rendered exquisitely by Alma-Tadema. We had pomegranates everywhere, crushing and popping their juicy cells like fragrant frogspawn in the clash and lick of thighs and hips.
A thigh and hip diet full of vitamin C… then the meatier, more equatorial juices, the colonial issues that I admit I probed for as if they were indeed an elixir of life. Does this denigrate her? Did my idyll of Michelangelo denigrate my prawn-pricked lover on the canal? What denigrated them most, perhaps, was the utter dejuicing enacted upon them. I have, in my time, extracted juices. I am the man from Del Monte, declaring the eternal ‘Yes!’ in my white hat and resilient, immaculate suit. It is stained when seen up close. I left them both as husks; the pulped rinds and kernels scattered in my wake.
A cellar full of wine. I was thirty by now and dying for a drink. I got pissed for a while. That was a poppy, that flower. I know that one; the fumes were intoxicating even before its heady incarnation. I emptied the musky old bottles one by one, greedily, by myself. I found myself replenished, eager for more. Three flowers left.
Rampant Colette, the rapacious grande dame with the grace to regard me still as a boy, though the crow’s feet were there, albeit invisible with foundation. We romped. Never before had I romped. I felt like a puppy. She was huge, this woman; catastrophically huge. She offered me an arid landmass to ' clamber and keelhauled myself on her vigorous bulk. I who, when first mate on the barge or juice extractor by the pool of the dewy-eyed girl, had felt dignified, self-possessed and… well, large, was dwarfed by this grandmother. Earlier, exactness, precision, the delicate clasp had been all. Now I needed to take a running jump, hold on for grim life. She, in her turn, toyed with me, flicking me about with able, coarsened hands. She ripped me to shreds, parts of my body were tattered and bloody after each encounter. But I loved it.
As I say, she was catastrophically huge and her heart, so deeply buried and imperturbable, gave a resounding click one afternoon as I tricked her into coming. Penetration had never done the trick; it was a slight thing, the licking of her nose with a feather that tripped the alarm, as I bobbed in and out of her like a sewing needle, but it was too much… and that was that.
He was angular and stark and, I grudgingly admit, my next Japanese flower was quite like my earlier self. I was of an age to appreciate a retrospective narcissism. Like that portrait of Isherwood; the wryly salacious glance in the mirror at the younger you. I let him, as my poor dear Colette had let me, cross and re-cross the continent I had drifted into. He rummaged amid what he would turn out to be, but with reverence. I was his temple, his monument, and he came to me to pray. As pigeons spatter on Nelson’s column, he brought forth his juvenile cockfuls of phlegm onto me. I took the tribute well; cleaned my roughening edges on his purer lines.
Naturally when his grandfather copped it, he cleared off with the inheritance. He got money. The lucky sod.
And my last…
We are always told to keep the best to last. In a meal, with the courses and deliciously aromatic, steaming constituents arranged before us, the least wasteful, most sensible among us save the best till last. Michelangelo on the barge knew this. He ate the prawns in the cocktail last of all. I laughed at him; stole them before he ever got that far, from under his intense Mediterranean gaze. I could never bear puritans. Luckily I never had one for long.
But my first flower would have appreciated what Grandfather bequeathed me last of all.
The last flower trembled between my fingers above the water’s eager meniscus. It was a crushed, violet rose. Genet would have approved. I held my breath; number seven. I didn’t dare tear through the empty book’s pages to check that I hadn’t counted incorrectly. I opened my hand and the petals fell.
It was a rubber band.
When I finish scrawling this, on these pages thickened and stiffened with canal water, chocolate smudges, fruit juices, wine stains, come from men and women… then I shall press them back together. Perhaps the book, its spine thwarted with fattened leaves, ruptured by sated desires, will refuse to shut. To this end I am going to use the rubber band. I don’t know where it may have been… but who cares? Just look where this book has been. Michelangelo was right, in a way, in that woolly head of his… rubber bands do ‘come in’. This one will stretch a coherence across the messy infusions of my life.
And one day, most probably quite soon, I shall stretch it. Stretch it open… like foreskin, like hymen… and peer between the dark pages for the signs, the delicate rustlings between the sheets of more dried Japanese flowers, the ones I know must still be in there, somewhere.
JUDITH’S DO ROUND HERS
I’ll tell you who I’m a
