2005 some bloody summer
After a spaghetti breakfast, with bowl of chicken stock, thick, warm, rich yellow, I wandered in aimless fashion in the garage block to think of what I could storm. But I haven’t the heart to grant permission to throw away in a brutality, at least to me, things that used to belong to my aunt. I prepared early, a lunch that I would take in the late afternoon, around three; three thin loin steaks, cherry tomato, chicken stock, salt, pepper, a slug of oil, a chunk of butter. They simmer, bubble, steam, in emotionless anxiety.
I switch it off; then I open an earlier-than-usual-bad-for-the-body beer, put my clothes in the washing machine, then drink, in rawness, like a macho-man in a cowboy saloon in western days of yore when men taught their women the truth about what little they knew, the gun, the horse and the cow; it must have seemed an interesting time to those living there ...
I struggle upstairs, shower, then make my way, in fresh clothes with dashing perfume, out of the house down St Francis. He, I think, would like me; I throw bread and other bits to the birds, every morning, I fill their bowl with water, without charge. Magpie, sparrow, robin, tit; it pleases me much when they come to drink, or take a bath.
I went yet again to the corner shop, on Llwynu to pick up a few cans of relaxing juice for me. The assistant was the bend-over woman of male hormonal passion, alas, but not today.
It is the early afternoon, cloudy, but warm; I walked back, to stop for a brief rest to hear the heat of the beat of my heart in my chest. I went, without further thought, to my place where the pylons terminate; there, a carrier bag, the cry of the magpie, I think, in the upper part of the tree. I gazed upon the colours of the green valley, the occasional bird-flirt through the afternoon air. There were light green, dark green, in-between green, un-cooked green, lettuce green, old and young green, bake, fry, grill, mezzo forte, pianissimo green; they were clear in the muggy, warm, and colourless air. Two wretched trains went by, from the north, one, a hideous mélange of unrelated bastard colour that might have suited some inept Amsterdam suburb, the other, a violent shade of sporty green; both burst upon that pastoral purity like some drug festooned freak.
A bird or birds sang through the tree. I analysed the plant life; a loving creeper that swirled around tree trunk; the white cluster of light mustering flowers that had tiny stalks of yellow. There, the small white and yellow mini-thorn creepers. The Oranjeboom can I kicked into the rough grass at the edge. I think Percy Montgomery might have appreciated my artistry, for the can too was part of the natural scene. I poured the last few drops of my Carlsberg on it; it’s not what you might think. I thought I might leave another can, hidden from the public gaze that they might mate on a warm summer’s night in a million years hence, the life forms coming in a new molecular rural brewery. Thoughts of an insane, hooch-coloured mind, maybe, but the world evolved into this insanity in the aeons of Silurian mishmash, Carboniferous mayhem and Jurassic trash, so why not my discarded can of Oranjeboom?
An elderly woman passed by, a brief greeting. Then, a mother came by with a child in a pushchair, whose crying hurt the afternoon air. I hate it when youngsters cry, especially when they have to bear the mercy of someone who might not be taking good care of them. I think that if I saw an adult berate a youngster, I would become angry and not waste time to castigate, but maybe in a violent exciting way, pull out a hunting knife, thrust, turn, kill, and would not regret, and yet ... but this mother, or grandmother, I wasn’t sure, seemed kind, and didn’t abandon their duty, to teach the child that the father had to go to work.
The evening clock ticks in the warm air of the evening, the early weak rays complete their marathon run. Next to me, resting after the journey, the illiterate envelope from my wife, with two rough stamps on it, scuffed and scruffy, two international hobos, with a fifty cent ‘Ananas comosus’, and a one ringgit ’Garcinia mangostana’; thoughts of walk-by-sea big-chess-eat-by-the-pool hotel Kijal-golf course Awana.
The tang of the former and the juice of the latter would go down well now. The fruit I refer to.
But at least on this summer solstice, I can share their warmth.
