Avocado
An exotic adventure of sensuality and spirit
By Christine Leov Lealand
Author of bestselling Quintessence and Astride
Copyright Christine Leov Lealand 2010 Smashwords.com edition
All rights reserved.
Available in print in Australia and New Zealand from Penguin Books
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Dedication: To HJM with love and appreciation
“Masturbation
is one of life’s greatest sources of pleasure; thrilling in itself,
a release from tension, a sweet sedative before sleep, a beauty
treatment that leaves us glowing, our countenance more tranquil, our
smile more mysterious.”
Nancy Friday, Women on Top, 1991
Chapter
1 Home again
Stuart
New Zealand again. So cool, damp and green. Full of those familiar native trees and shrubs that grow nowhere else. I breathed deeply as I walked down the narrow road from the crossroads where my ride dropped me off. I was suffering from jet lag but I hadn’t let that stop me hitching the first ride out of Auckland I could get. Took me to the Bay of Islands, so I wasn’t complaining. I paused in the bush and rolled up some of the holy weed that my generous lift had given me. Life is good, Jah is good, and Goddess cares for me. The sacred smoke filled me with passion and relaxation.
Glory to word, glory to sound, glory to power
Glory to the Most High Jah Ras Tafari.
I hummed slow reggae as I swung my leaden legs down the steep slope that led, I hoped, to the beach. To rest and joy. My spirit guides were with me and their fingers all pointed down, down, down, so down I went.
Oddly enough, the nearer to the valley I got the rougher the houses were. You’d think that they would be more expensive as you got closer to the beach. Down at the shady valley bottom the houses were tiny. One- and two-roomed shacks. Some of them nearly buried in the bush. A gentle breeze sighed through the trees. Somewhere water trickled.
Everything was lush and green. I gloried in its beauty. It was a major contrast to the arid land and overcrowding of India. A stream, almost overgrown with taro and kikuyu grass, wound its sluggish way in front of the shacks. Ramshackle bridges crossed it here and there.
Yes! A beach was at the end of the road. I sat down on the grass beside the shingle and seaweed expanse and looked out at the sea. Tiny waves lapped gently in time to their own metronome. A lot of yachts were moored in the bay in front of me and way out further was the opposite shore with big houses peeping out here and there from the bush.
Stu, I told myself, you’ve done the right thing. Taking a deep breath I lay down with my head on my backpack and let out a big sigh. I slept undisturbed until the chill of the early evening and hungry vampire mosquitoes woke me.
I walked back up the road wondering if I could find a bed for the night. I hadn’t changed my money or done anything sensible like that at the airport.
Just trusted in Jah and travelled.
Dawn
I was standing on the lawn looking at the flowers covering the big avocado tree dad had planted years ago. It overhung the porch of the bach my family have owned for the last 40 years. It was the very first avocado we’d ever bought and he planted the seed just to see if it’d grow. Boy did it grow! Towers over the bath now. Nearly hides it from the road, in fact. I climb on the roof and risk the clearlite caving in to pick the avocados when they’re big enough.
The new crop looked like it was going to be another good one. I needed it. To eat and to sell. The dole’s not enough for anybody to live on for long. Maybe I’d be able to get a waitressing job soon. I sighed, thinking of my single status here, in the old family bach. God, I’m restless, don’t know what to do with myself. I really need a man. I need a good fuck. Someone to love, preferably. I sighed and began to go inside to make tea.
‘Hello – is there anywhere to stay around here?’ A deep voice from the road called out to me. Startled, I turned and there was this dude standing there, across the creek. What a weird one! Scared me in fact. Like my daydreams becoming reality or something. You gotta be careful what you wish for . . . wanting a man like that – shame on you, girl.
Bleached dreadlocks down to his waist, all plaited with feathers and wild coloured things, ragged backpack and tatty hand-painted khaki cargo pants bulging with stuff in the side pockets. He was handsome but – sheesh – what a get-up! Mum’d have a fit if she saw a guy dressed like that! He looks . . . feral . . . like one of those wild greenies.
Mind you in a way it’s boring, predictable to meet a guy like that here. Outside of Auckland (where they all wear black – I call it dour-dressing) almost everyone I meet these days comes colourfully adorned with meaningful tattoos, rings, crystals and wild psycho-accessories to match, including healing abilities and pedigrees from past incarnations. Some claim they were ancient yogis or warriors and I’ve met former alien beings and Egyptian pharaohs.
Most of them have changed their name too, Jane becomes a Shanty, George becomes Dolphin, Mary Jane turns into Ripple. As if changing your name and wearing a lot of hardware is a cure-all for confusion and guilt . . . I wonder how confused this guy is. Even more, what is he guilty about?
Bet he’s got tats all over underneath, too. Betcha.
Stuart
She was gorgeous with long dark hair flowing over her shoulders. Breasts barely hidden by her thin t-shirt and a pair of brief ragged denim shorts which emphasised her long tanned legs. Despite my tiredness I got a hard-on just looking at her.
She didn’t answer me for a while. Just looked at me. I could still hear the waves lapping gently on the beach and I really wanted to rest a while longer here in this peaceful valley. I felt sick of travelling and full of longing for a resting place, for peace and calm and quiet. For a change of woman, too. My spiritual energies needed earth and water to rejuvenate after the long flight and the horrible disaster with Uma. I sighed and shuddered and rejected the sadness that threatened to fill me.
She frowned at me. ‘Nah,’ she said. ‘There’s nowhere here for you to stay but you can have a cuppa if you want.’ She beckoned me across the narrow log bridge which spanned the deep overgrown creek between the road and the scruffy long grass she was standing in.
‘The nearest backpackers is about 40 minutes walk that way.’ She gestured towards the beach with a tanned arm. ‘So you’ll need a cuppa to fortify you.’
I hadn’t moved, just stood drinking her in. ‘Do ya want one or not? Are you one of those people who just have hot water or something naff like that?’
I laughed and said, ‘No. I’d love a cuppa if you really want to make one just for me.’
‘I like making tea for strangers,’ she said. ‘It’s traditional in our valley, tea-making. You meet some really interesting people.’
Dawn
His voice was deep and really masculine some-extra-how. With a bit of an American accent. He kept staring at me and all of a sudden my whole body blushed as my ovaries jumped in my pelvis. They really jumped just like they were saying, we can tell from ten metres this is the best genetic material for you, girl!
I ignored my body and turned away to go inside. Hey – what’s a body for if not to ignore? Men are trouble, mum always says, and boy is she right about that. Besides, I didn’t want him to see me blushing.
Mr Dread decided to follow me and I watched him cross the bridge. It didn’t faze him one bit, balancing that big pack on his shoulders, he strolled over it easily and walked up the path grinning at me as I stood beside the door.
He seemed like this lion or maybe a tiger, some tawny masculine beast walking into my life. I felt a shiver of excitement thrill through me. He dropped the pack inside the porch and I went and plugged the jug in. I lit a candle on the table and another on the bench so I could see to make the tea. Now the sun was down it was very dim in the bach but I didn’t want too much light.
Stuart
Jeez – what an old dump that bach was! It was plain she was living there. It was neat and clean but the curtains must have been 40 years old, the carpet in its third reincarnation and the kitchen mustard yellow and orange with a lime-green trim. The same colours that made me feel sick when I was a kid.
She shoved a teabag each into two lumpy brown pottery mugs, opened an old Vegemite jar and asked, ‘Sugar?’
‘Yeah – two,’ I said and collapsed on the pile of cushions stacked up in a corner lit by three old double-hung windows. The living room-cum-kitchen had seen a lot of better days and a lot of worse tenants to judge by the collapsing fibrous plaster bulleted with old nail holes and rusty cup hooks and daubed with faded crooked stickers. The builder’s paper that lined the roof was flaking away from the pitted corrugated iron and there was no other insulation.
Past a curtain draped at an angle across the far end of the room I could see a double bed covered with a lace bedspread. A bright yellow pottery bowl of ripening avocados sat on the table beside an open book and some knitting. A tortoiseshell cat with runny eyes came up to me purring and smelled me all over. I bet I have some interesting smells, I thought as I stroked the cat. Dogs and cows and kids from India, Uma too though that smell is pretty ancient now.
I could smell her now, taste her now and the love and loss I suffered for her made me crumple up and breathe deeply. My guides clustered around me. Forget the past, they whispered, forget . . . forget . . . live in the here and now . . . here and now . . .
She was even making a plate of crackers, cheese, avocado and tomato slices for me. Her mum did bring her up well. I scrubbed my hands over my face to erase my chaotic emotions as she finished in the kitchen and came in.
‘What’s ya name?’ she asked.
‘Stuart, what’s yours?’ She handed me my tea and a plate of crackers.
‘Dawn. Mum reckoned it was pretty – the dawn of the day I was born.’
‘Oh. Right. Must have been an amazingly lovely dawn.’
‘You Scottish? You sound a bit foreign.’ She was suspicious of my flattery.
‘Nah. I grew up down south, Lumsden actually.’
‘Lumsden! Where the heck is that?’ she was incredulous. ‘I thought you were a foreign backpacker.’
‘I sort of am a foreigner now, been overseas for the last seven years. Lumsden’s in Southland, not far from Queenstown.’
‘Gee – Lumsden – I thought no one lived down there, isn’t it freezing cold all the time?’
I grinned at her. ‘Ya get used to it and there are compensations. Dry air, snow sometimes in the winter, lots of sunshine.’ She sat on the carpet opposite me and the way she crossed her legs sent me to visual heaven and back. ‘I flew in from Calcutta via Bangkok early this morning. I spent a bit of time in the States, so I suppose that’s why I have an accent.’
Dawn
He was very relaxed sitting in my living room on my cushions, legs wide apart. And he didn’t smell too bad either. I’ve always thought dreadlocks look dirty. God knows they must be difficult to wash and keep clean and nit free, you know. Especially in India – urgh.
‘Lumsden to India. Weird. My dad came from down south too. Christchurch.’ Stuart laughed and showed his teeth, perfectly even and white.
‘Where did you grow up?’ he asked.
‘Devonport,’ I said. ‘Nothing much to say about it – I was a typical urban kid growing up in Auckland and dragged to the Bay of Islands for every single holiday there was.’
‘So is this the holiday bach?’
‘Yup – in all its glory. I had a hell of a job cleaning it up when I got here. Convolvulus growing all through the rooms. Birds’ nests and rats everywhere. It’s a palace now compared to what it was.’
He was looking at me, you know, with that look, the hungry man on the prowl kinda look and I kept looking down at the floor, not meeting his eyes. He was too onto it, I felt like he could see through me, through my clothes and that he was lusting for me. Well tough shit mate, I wanted to tell him, I’m a recently wounded woman and I’m not having any more men in my life. So fuck off!
‘You’ve done a lot of work then.’ He sat back, looked up at the roof then back at me, cradling his tea. ‘Is there a man in your life?’ he asked. Nosy isn’t he? I suppose he’s single since he’s just come home from India. I’ve never heard of anyone getting hitched over there and coming home again.
‘No. Not now.’ I tried to look nonchalant. ‘He buggered off with my best friend, the bastard.’ Now what had I told him that for? I am stupid, aren’t I? Now he knows I’m single he’ll probably stick around like a bad smell.
But he was polite, and so was I – like mum taught me, and we chatted on and on easily, eating the bickies, our tea long drunk, until suddenly it was pitch dark.
Stuart
I could hear rats scurrying around in the roof. The whole place was buried in trees and very basic but it was a palace compared to the houses in the village in India where I’d lived only three weeks ago.
I didn’t tell Dawn that I had a torch in my pack. By the time we’d finished chatting I really liked her and certainly my body wanted her. I wanted to stay, get to know her better. But I sensed that she’d been hurt by that ex-boyfriend, that something wasn’t quite right and I wanted to make it right. Do the best I could to get her trust before I got anything out of it. Jah would provide the way.
‘Come down the beach, I’ll show you the beginning of the path.’ She led the way and I picked up my pack and lugged it down there too, just to show it wasn’t a waste of time, her showing me the path. Even though, at the first opportunity, I’d say yes to staying.
I followed Dawn down to the beach and along to some big trees towering darkly over one end. It looked like the beach ended in a cliff but the coast path climbed up in easy white shell zigzags and disappeared into the darkness of the bush.
‘If you want to go, that’s the way to go, otherwise you have to climb the hill again and it’s about 10 k into town.’ Dawn hesitated. ‘I feel guilty sending you round there now. It’s really dark and there’s only a half moon. I haven’t got a torch I can spare, and I suppose you haven’t either.’ She paused, I said nothing. ‘You could stay at the bach tonight if you want. You’ll have to sleep in the spare room with the family’s junk, though.’ She moved away from me in the direction of home. Giving me space to think.
‘Thank you. Are you sure?’ I asked. ‘Do you trust me?’ Do I trust me? I’ve lied by omission about the torch and she doesn’t even know I’ve lied. My guardians clustered around us like loving mothers, smiling and looking great.
She looked fiercely at me. ‘Are you to be trusted?’ she asked firmly, really wanting to know, wanting me to say I’m not going to rape her in her sleep.
I paused. ‘Yes. You are my hostess. As your guest I deem you and your body sacred. May Jah protect you. Fear nothing from me.’ I smiled at her upturned face lit softly with the moon and the reflected night sky shining on the sea. ‘I am your friend. And I thank you with all my heart for the invitation.’ She smiled, then shook her head, obviously thinking I was a strange one, and walked away.
Besides, I thought, following her. I’m too tired to do anything. Tomorrow, maybe, or the next day but not tonight.
‘Who’s Jah?’ she asked as we walked up the valley and across the bridge to the bach.
‘The one God – representing the many. I am a Rastaman, as you can see from my hair, and also a shaman. I have been studying the arts of magic and healing in nature for the last two years in India and before that in America and also with the Druids in England.’
‘That’s a hell of a mix of religions, isn’t it? Don’t they clash a bit?’
‘Perhaps they do sometimes, but I just ignore the bits that disagree. I seek knowledge and to gain the intuition that you women have naturally. I also want to be able to help people.’ She walked ahead of me, listening.
‘You know what I missed most when I was overseas? ‘
‘No – what?’
‘I missed the Maori people and their language. It’s a real solid part of our New Zealand culture and I missed those guys like crazy. Sure, there were plenty of languages and people with all kinds of skin colours but none were like our Maori and – I felt empty, as if the world was full of racists because there weren’t any kind friendly wild Maori faces anywhere around. No koru patterns, no Maori-style tattoos in the tattoo shops. And the songs, I missed them on the radio. And saying kia ora! Well who the hell can you say that to in LA or Kathmandu?
‘Yeah,’ I began to roll a joint meditatively. ‘I sure missed them and that’s one of the reasons why I came back. For all the “progress” of the rest of the world I reckon New Zealand is the safest place to bring up kids, ya know?’
Dawn grinned back at me in the semi-darkness. ‘I know. Do you think it’s likely that you’ll have any kids then?’ she asked. I blushed in confusion. Shit – she’s so close to the truth! I’ll have to tell her about Uma sometime.
‘I really don’t know,’ I said uncertainly, already certain in my own mind.
Dawn stopped and looked up at the big tree outside the bach. ‘What does your intuition tell you about avocados, then?’ she asked mischievously. Challenging me.
I hesitated – ‘Nothing yet, why?’ Dawn gestured to the tree.
‘That’s my avocado tree, I love avocados – do you?’
‘Yeah. Haven’t tasted one for ages though.’
‘I’ll make some guacamole then,’ she said and vanished indoors.
I stood there, looking up at the magnificent tree covered in moon-silvered white cascades of flowers. It almost hid all of the front of the bach. Silently I prayed to Jah and the avocado tree diva to guide me. Breathed deep and went inside.
Chapter 2 Yellow sari
Stuart
The spare room was just a tin shed buried in the bush up the back of the main bach. It was full of broken chairs, cobwebs, a spare kitchen sink, mouldering old kapok mattresses and a broken bed.
I helped Dawn chuck most of this stuff out into the bush and we laid out all the old mattresses until we found a fairly clean dry one that the rats hadn’t gotten into too badly. Grotty as it was I thought the place was pretty luxurious compared to India. It was quiet, full of the sounds of nature, not people.
Dawn went to get matches and candles for me while I unpacked by the light of the moon. It was so peaceful, only the frogs and crickets chirruping now and then. An occasional car drove down the road but nothing else disturbed the night. Several of the other baches had lights on in them and I could hear the vague din of a TV somewhere up the valley.
Dawn arrived with the candles and I set them up in the pottery candlesticks that sat on the windowsill. ‘My brother Mike made the candlesticks especially for our bach,’ she said grinning, ‘Good idea eh? He’s a potter. A student yet – but he’s going to be good. I’m expecting him to turn up over Christmas sometime, along with mum and dad and Trish, my sister.’ She sighed. ‘There’ll be a full house then. I don’t know how I’ll cope with them all.’
I pulled out a yellow sari from my pack and was suddenly transported back to Uma’s arms, her smell, her sweet lisping voice. Sorrow struck me like a blow over the head from a full beer bottle. A sob came to my throat and I groaned in pain. When I looked up Dawn had vanished silently into the night. The house below me was dark.
I felt relieved at her tact. I made up my bed on the floor and lay back staring at the moonlight pouring through the window and smelling the fresh air, so cool, neutral and silent compared to Uma’s village.
I collapsed in the shade of a big tree. Because this was India there were thirty or forty other people all doing the same in the suffocating afternoon heat before the monsoon. Flies buzzed all around us and crawled over the cow that wandered among us sniffing for offerings of anything edible. It looked fatter than a lot of the people.
I lay on my pack and breathed a sigh of relief. I had happened to drop down beside a young woman in a bright yellow sari. After a few moments she silently, shyly, offered me a lassi and I gratefully accepted. I lay back and looked at her through my eyelashes. Petite compared to me or to European women she sat calmly. Her gold jewellery made her shaded velvet skin seem even more beautiful in contrast. My arms were brown but looked a wishy-washy white compared to hers. Suddenly I wanted to cover myself up. I was ashamed of my large body and uncouth ways. I felt like a randy tomcat sitting next to the most gorgeous Siamese kitten and I hesitated to say anything to her.
In the end she said, ‘Excuse me.’ I sat up. ‘Are you going far today?’
I was a bit stunned, surprised that she had spoken to me and said, ‘Yes, if I can get a ride but travelling doesn’t matter to me. I am in India to learn Ayurvedic medicine traditions and it doesn’t matter where I go to learn them.’ She smiled at me and the glare of her white teeth was blinding. Oh she was exquisite.
‘Jah will guide me in the right way,’ I added, then wondered – will she understand that?
‘There is a teacher in my village,’ she said in that soft rhythmic version of English that India has created. ‘He would be willing to teach you, he teaches many other people if they have the ability.’ Like a flash I saw that she wanted to help me, get to know me. She was the best of friends to me and helped me in many ways over the months I stayed in her village.
My medical lessons involved watching the medicine man as he inspected patients; prescribed foods and medicines to them and then talked about their ailments and body types to me and his two other students in his primitive English. Each day after the clinic was finished Uma would meet me outside the door of the medicine man’s shack and we’d go to have a lassi and maybe a curry together.
Always at the same little restaurant on the same street. She found me cheap accommodation in the back room of a large family home near her house, although she never took me to her home and I didn’t ask. She said she wanted to better her English language and I felt self-conscious then, of what I spoke and how I said it. I’d never experienced anyone wanting to learn English from me before.
It seemed odd that she never had a man accompanying her, as some traditions demanded, but she said that since the market was only a few houses away from her home she could shop unattended.
‘I don’t need my brothers with me, I am almost a European woman. My mother’s grandfather was an English engineer,’ she said proudly and I thought – she’s inherited a lot of spirit even if none of the other trappings of her mixed heritage. Uma lived with her father, grandmother and five older brothers.
It wasn’t until the day I left that I asked, ‘What happened to your mother, Uma?’ Innocently, thinking of a loss through natural causes, and Jah knows there are enough of them in India.
‘She died. In an accident in the kitchen when I was very small.’ A chill ran through me. I wondered if the reason for her death was the fact that after a string of sons Uma’s mother had had the misfortune to have a girl child. ‘Who looked after you then?’
‘My grandmother. She’s been good to me but now I hate her! She’s looking for a husband for me right now and I think she’s found one. Probably a horrible old man who’ll die and I’ll have to die with him!’ Although she had been whispering, Uma was trembling. Was it fear or anger?
All of me went still inside. I’d heard of this kind of thing happening in India but to have it pushed into my face was awful. Especially as this woman wasn’t a foreigner, someone in the newspaper. Uma wasn’t a stranger any more, but a sweet gorgeous female who had helped me further my studies and met me each day to talk and eat.
‘How can I help you, Uma?’ I reached out and touched her tiny hand. It was the first time we had touched and she melted into me like butter. God, she trusted me! Just as well she didn’t know the content of my fantasies about her each night as I lay in the heat and stench of my room, fending off mosquitoes and bed bugs.
Tears came to her eyes. ‘They can’t marry me off if I’m not a virgin,’ she whispered. Jah! She wants me for that? I rubbed my hand over my eyes, her hand squeezed mine and then slipped away like a swift fish.
‘How old are you, Uma?’ I looked her in the eyes. She was so petite she could have been a twelve-year-old girl at home in New Zealand.
‘Grandmother tells me I’m fifteen and way past marriage age. That’s why she has told my father she is looking for a husband for me. I have worked in the house for her all my life and now she is going to sell me to someone else to work for them and have babies.’ Her eyes were full of tears and I clasped her hand in mine.
‘Why me, Uma? Why not a man that you know and can trust?’
‘There are no men that will help me, they all want me a virgin for my husband too. That way my family will get the best bride price for me. Because you are foreigner I know you will help me. On TV I see your customs are different from ours. Your women choose their men and here in the cities some of the women can do that too. Here in our old-fashioned village the customs stay the same as they have always been. My grandmother will make sure of that. Take me with you Stuart, please take me away when you go.’
Her final words were soft and so beseeching that I melted. But I sat for a while, frozen, thinking. In front of me my totem, Leaping Salmon, appeared in the welter of a whirlpool and I said, ‘This could mean that your life will be in danger, Uma. You know that, don’t you? Your family will be very angry when they find out what you have done.’
Uma nodded. ‘I don’t have many choices, Stuart. Going away with you may be the only choice I have in my life. I want to go away with you now.’ She reached into the restaurant and pulled out a bulky cloth bag. ‘Each day I come here with you I have everything with me, prepared to leave. Until today I was too afraid to ask if I could go with you. The train to Calcutta leaves in an hour. If you agree I will meet you there. We cannot go together, we will be noticed.’ She sat eager and expectant.
The life ahead of her must have been really shitty for her to be so excited about running away with an eccentric foreigner whose only possessions were a tatty backpack, dreadlocks and crazy clothes. Surreptitiously I glanced around. With so many people close by it was difficult to know if our conversation had been overheard or not. But then I thought – what possible risk was there for me? Uma was the one taking the risks.
Ostentatiously apart we travelled until we got to Calcutta where we found a reasonably nice hotel. It had cheap small rooms, and a quiet garden; most of all it had privacy, which was very welcome. The crowds and stench were slowly wearing me down and I had begun to weary of the press of humanity, of the obvious transience of the human soul in its body as people young and old died around me daily. I could understand why Mother Teresa decided to assist only the dying. Trying to help anyone at any other stage of the journey was just too difficult. Making dying more comfortable and decent than a fly-ridden decay on the street could be done. Now, what could I do for Uma?
I took out my drum and began to beat it in that special rhythm: speed my spirit to her and see her, what she is doing and where and who with . . . I want to see you Uma. I will see you . . .
Chapter 3 Imagine . . .
Dawn
Well that yellow sari really did something to him. Poor guy, looks like he had a hard time in India. I’ve never been there and I don’t really want to go. I’m not into that ashram-hippie shit at all. He’s interesting though, I wonder what he means? Can he heal people? I want to get to know him better. Maybe I will let him stay a few days, especially if he’s any good at cooking.
I wonder what sort of fuck Stuart would be? He seems a sensitive type really. I know he’s a Rastaman and they have a pretty good reputation for rooting anything female but there’s more to him than that. I feel it. I know it . . . and it makes me really interested in him. Interested? Well – glowing and horny in fact. I know I asked him if I could trust him but can I really trust myself? Am I able to leave him alone up there in the rat-infested spare room and lie here, not having him, pretending to be cool, stand-offish, neutral about him when I’m not?
My body is right and I’ll follow my instincts this time. Not screw everything up like I did with Johno. Yet, even now, despise him as I may, I can’t stop my heart taking a little leap when I think his name, Johno. Johno the asshole! I want to shout it to the world.
I drew the curtain and closed the door, then lay on my lace coverlet and thought about what I’d really like in a lover. What I’d really adore Stuart to be for me.
Good firm body that he looks after, nicely muscled without too much flab. I suppose he smokes ganja, but he doesn’t seem to be on tobacco, which is marvellous. Smokers taste and smell bad and imagine a smoker’s mouth buried in my sweet and tender pussy lips . . . urghhhh. It’s not just the smoke that makes smoking obnoxious.
I want him to be tall enough so when I stand and press myself against him he’s the right height for me, not too tall, not too short. There are bright warm stars in the sky and a whispering breeze not unlike what I imagine his breath would be, if he put his lips to my ear. The sound of music, a begging back-beat, is floating in from the neighbourhood. We could dance to it, not touching at first, but wide open to each other. Each of us sending such a hot vibration to the other, the bit of air between us would be filled with us, and it would be like touching, even before our bodies met. And if we could hold off, knowing just how to move together, through one steamy set of music . . . what wouldn’t we do then, ohhhh what wouldn’t I do then, Stuart . . .
Mmmmm, I’d press my breasts against him. Take a deep breath of his body scent, bury my face in his neck and really smell him deep into my body, my lungs, my sense of who and what he is. Just that first sniff of him will tell me almost all I will ever need to know about him. If he’s the right man for me. If he’s the wrong man.
I’m longing for it, that first snuff of his essence. Will I like it or will there be something faintly obnoxious about it? Something that will turn me off him?
I can imagine I feel it now, the electricity of his touch on my skin, his smell in my body. Suddenly my body will be awake to the fact that here is a male to mate with, and my juices will begin to flow, my vagina tighten, my breasts pay attention to his chest. And if it all flows right he will hold me against him and I will feel his penis firming in his pants, the odour of his body strengthening in response to mine and his lips will just brush my lips with a lightning-like charge that zaps through me and I begin to melt a little.
His hands will move down to my ass cheeks and hold them firmly, squeeze them perhaps, and press me even more firmly to him. I slide my hands up under his hair and massage the nape of his neck. My soft lips are parted and I brush them against his lips, his moustache brushes my upper lip – I love that feeling. A stroke, a tingle, redolent of himself. So masculine.
As I reach up to stroke his neck I find that underneath his dreads are soft and silky, weighty like big breasts or large testicles weighed in the hand. Precious, like an accumulation of history. His commitment not to cut his hair ever again has a real meaning, a significance that attracts and repels me. Tied into his hair – this feather from Arizona, this brass clasp from Rajasthan, these blue beads from Brazil, this amber from Lombok. His scent straight from a Hindu temple, slight yet strong, smoky in a delicious way, beguiling and thrilling through me.
He strokes his face against mine and fills me with a satisfaction I have only guessed at before. I didn’t know I needed to nuzzle with him, to rub our noses together. No wonder the Maori give the mutual touch of the nose such importance, such a power of greeting and knowing. By the hongi shall you know him and I do . . . ahhh I do know him and I want him.
Now he is hard in his pants and his hands slide up my back, up my sides, under my arms and cup my breasts, his thumbs unerringly finding my nipples. I shudder as sparkles sizzle through me, diving down into my womanhood, massaging an internal erotic centre that no other touch than this on my nipples will evoke and stroke.
His breath melds with my breath and it is sweet, warm and long. I want to match my nostrils to his, breathe in unison in and out of his life, his lungs, his lovingness. Ahhh what sweet intimacy it is and I feel him tremble with need against me. My hand slips around his body and presses the front of his pants enough to feel him, to want to unzip him. I pause, beguiled by the size of him, his eager hardness, by what that sleek cylindrical hardness will mean in measurement of pleasure inside me. Touching, breathing, we linger. Stroking, kissing, delighting in this long moment of anticipation.
My cunt is getting wetter, hotter, aching slightly with desire. As he strokes my breasts his mouth meets mine, soft, open. His tongue strokes the inside of my upper lip and I shudder, press closer to him. I moan slightly, not knowing what sound I make merely that a need is answered by a sound – a call from my inner being. My female desire is made into sound and he hears me and pulls me closer.
I slip his t-shirt off him and he slides my wide-necked blouse to my waist. My bra vanishes and at last, naked flesh to flesh we press, electricity zipping between us like brushfire. Igniting lightning which discharges all around us in a firestorm of desire.
Now I’m panting as he strokes me with his big hands, his mouth kissing my neck and gently biting me there. Shudders run through me, my legs buckle and I think I might faint. I’ll fall into his arms and there’ll be no returning to the shores of sanity, of life without him, of loneliness or frustration. He will be everything I need, just as he is right now and I’ll want for nothing in his arms. His sweet kisses and love will solve all my problems and I am safe.
Safety with a man. What a delightful concept. It’s what my mum taught me I could have but I haven’t found it yet. And into my joy in Stuart’s arms comes a chill of cynicism and a recognition of his human inability to be what my dreams desire. I falter a little, pause and take a deep breath to see the human inside the feelings we are sharing. To know and accept his faults: his pimples, his straggly beard. His flaws, whatever they may be and love him because of them too. Because only he has these frailties, only he smells this way in the morning, only he could fuck up this bad and still live . . . My love loves you because you are unique. Not because you are the best man in the world or the only man for me.
Desire . . . such a liquid feeling, yet full of fire like the best vodka which never freezes in the deep freeze. Liquid flame which fills me with light and energy and action. Action focused on you, your body. I loosen your belt, unzip your fly and your pants fall to the floor in a rumpled mass over your feet. Out in the night I hear the sound of drumming: soft, insistent, measured and measuring our heat.
Ahhhhhhh your bodyyyyyy . . . my senses smell you, see you, touch you and you’re so hot, your penis thrusting out into your underpants, your thighs stocky and strong supporting your tight bum. My fingers travel over your body, searching for more delights and finding them. The crack of your ass, warm and slightly furry, a dimple in your cheek, the urgent strength of your erection pressing against my hand, be-furred balls taut and excited, calling to me. Saying – here we are, ammunition in this sweet war of love, loaded cannon bewitching me, beguiling me with a magic all their own. A magic all for me, just for me.
My hips begin to move, to jive to our beat as it pounds on and on. Calling out to the night for a matching beat, met by the throbbing in my blood. I ache for you, Stu. I ache, my hips thrust forward and you slip your palm over my pussy outside my jeans and press up onto my mons and there I stand, transfixed by your hand. Safe, held, yet my heat bottled, turned inwards, burning hot and spicy around my clit as you press my lips inwards and suck my mouth sweetly into yours in a delirium metered only by the pounding of the drum. I am accelerating faster and faster. My heart beats like I am running a race.
Against me I can feel your heart beating too. We beat together with the drums, tom-toms in the night signalling love, not war, as my hands stroke your body, your long muscular back, your warm chest with so few hairs on it. It’s like all the hair on your body went to your head and we can be flesh to flesh without the soft intervention of fur.
Your arms hold me tight and then loosen as you slide your hands to my zipper and slowly unzip my jeans. I gasp at your daring, how I wanted you to undress me, slide my tight jeans down my body, hold them down while I step out of them; then, kneeling at my feet, a position I love you to take it’s so unexpected, so different from our New Zealand culture, kneeling in worship of another human being. You reach up and slip my panties gently down, I lift my feet as you remove them, fling them away and I stand before you.
Uncovered, nude, exposed and enjoying every second of the hungry way you are looking at me, drinking me in with your eyes. Then you wrap your long arms around me and press your face to my pussy fur; I can hear you snuffing deeply of my sexual scent. I abandon myself to you, to your senses, letting my odour and warmth, my sexual need flow into you, I sway back, leaning out, arms spread in wonder at you.
Your tongue begins to explore me, prising my legs apart little by little. Ahh . . . tingles race through me from your tongue and fingers and soon you have it in your reach. My clit erect and begging for attention, caressed by your firm lips and tongue. Wild bliss melding with the scent of ginger in the night.
I grip your dreads, supporting myself as I almost overbalance, not knowing which way is up any more, barely conscious as you lap and probe between my thighs. The touch is driving me wild and I murmur, babble something and you say, ‘What?’ and stand up, wrapping me once more in your arms. Trembling, I stand in your embrace.
‘Stuart . . . Stuart,’ I murmur your name, tasting the shape of your name, the essence of you in a word on my lips, forming the t with the tip of my tongue behind my teeth. Then I slide down to my knees and start to worship your penis. He juts out, knowing his purpose but never when or with whom he will join. I sniff the tip of him, allowing his juice to drip slowly onto my lip. Sweet male essence, mmmm. Then I rub him over and over my face: cheeks, lips, and forehead. A tactile adoration which is sincere and deep within me, my body surrendering to the sensation of worship, the sincerity of something which really touches me deeply. Your hands buried in my hair, you moan softly as I slip your knob into my mouth, begin to suck, to take you into my body.
I say your name over and over around your cock, humming a deep vibration into your flesh. Ahhhh so warm. He is so long that I cannot hold him all in my mouth comfortably. I challenge myself to slip him further in, deeper down my throat, trying not to gag around him. Surrendering to his length, to your urgency as you move your hips in and out, enjoying with sighs and moans the tightness of my mouth, the swirling of my tongue around your most sensitive flesh.
Before I have begun to tire you interrupt me, pull me to my feet and I feel a sense of triumph, that I could get you so aroused, ready to come and you have to make me quit now, right now, because you do not want to spend your first orgasm in my mouth. The girl, that mischievous little girl inside me, giggles fiendishly. Your passionate kisses drown her out and you lower me down to the floor, right in the middle of the living room and lay yourself down on top of me. Elbows propping yourself up like a gentleman, you kiss and kiss me, your dripping prick lying along my thigh like a magic wand, full of promise and not pumpkins.
Before your weight can crush me you rise up and look at me, lying there, melted, panting, glowing with invitation, legs akimbo astride your hips. Your cock between us, a suggestion of the animal, of something persuasively needy hovering there, wanting to be acted upon and I want him! Yes I want him. I reach out and touch him, he jerks and quivers, you gasp and your eyes close as I pulse him. Your hand strays to my mons and begins to stroke my dripping vulva as it opens up like a flower under your touch, begging for you, to have your length deep inside that depth created especially for you. All my feelings focus on your hand, those long strong fingers as you touch, tremble, fondle and probe within me.
You seem to know just how to touch me and if it jars a little, if the sensation moves aside to another minute area of my clit, of my labia, then I can slide your fingertips there, to just there and you will keep on doing that! Yes! Just that and it is divine. I can feel you now, your penis plunging into me and the image drenches my pussy more and more around your fingers.
You lift my legs over your shoulders and eagerly I lift up my hips, begging, begging for your cock within me, longing, longing for your body to fill me. Slowly you tease me, stroke him over my cunt lips, push him in a little and withdraw, my body tense with readiness, with longing. I am begging you to thrust him in, my fingers gripping the carpet, your arms, anything they can grab onto, your smile sweeping me away on tides of delight. This is better than drugs or politics or even Pokemon. Sex is forever as you slope your cock into my core, easing him all the way inside that lonely ache and plumbing my depths to the limit of human endurance.
I cry out in bliss, overwhelmed by your body, the electricity between us, erupting thunderclouds between two peaks of fire. Your prick paints yellow and ochre and red landscapes on my cervix and I orgasm, over and over, over and over; my fingers strumming my clit in rhythm to your thrusts and you come. Crying out in some foreign language, calling Jah to you . . . whatever . . . and I open my eyes, look up at you, arched in joy as your semen spurts within me and I love you. In that instant you are loved, for all time beloved.
Panting I am lying on my bed, fingers buried deep within me and a car is driving down the hill. I pray that it won’t stop outside my place. It drives past, I hear it turn at the bottom of the road beside the beach and drive up again. Then it parks, right outside my place. Shit!
I get dressed as footsteps are crunching up the path. ‘Piss off you bastard,’ I mutter to myself. It’s no good, whoever it is has seen my light on.
‘Gidday sis,’ says my little brother Mike. ‘I’ve come to stay for the weekend.’
Chapter 4 Bay of Islands
Stuart
The mossed-over windows of Dawn’s bach look out into a forest of luxuriant trees, ferns and plants tangled in a tropical profusion of greens and mysterious darknesses. Grass growing up trees and poles. Blue morning glory hanging in bridal showers from power poles and the eves of the roof. My room looked down on the wilderness of green and the rusty roofs of the other baches. Beyond them I could see the turquoise waters of the bay simmering in the morning heat. How different it is to India! I marvel again and again. How empty of people, silent and calm. As if I were on a different planet.
I asked Dawn if I could stay for a few days. Just hang out so I can have a rest, acclimatise and learn how to sleep again. Ahhh I can breathe out forever here…
Dawn
From the front room I can catch a glimpse, up on the ridge above the valley and along the coast, of the sleek cars and cosy homes of the retired who have invested their all upon this unstable clay hillside above the sea. Slowly the clay creeps downhill, a little every time it rains heavily and someday the sea will have them all in a big rush of destruction and pollution. Around the houses the bush has crept rapidly in and filled the gaps with manuka and kanuka, ponga and fern. Jasmine and ginger push out into the bush in their turn. Strangling and cramping the other plants. Filling the air with sweet cloying perfumes not native to our bush.
Stuart
Olive-coloured lichen is knotted all over the branches of the plum tree and the old apple tree. The pear tree next door groans beneath a load of convolvulus. Beyond that is bamboo thrusting for the sky, wild triffid grasses. Lawnmower nightmares of giant grass preying on helpless Masports. It seems at first glance that no effort has been made for years to keep these plants at bay.
But then – even as I’m watching, it grows inch by inch, day by day. I realise that a continual war has to be waged against the wandering willy, the wild ginger, the convolvulus and kikuyu grass, the bamboo regularly sawed back to a useful limit.
Without using chemical controls to keep the vegetation at bay, afternoons have to be spent with a machete scything down the undergrowth and forking it into compost heaps. There most of the weeds will cook and die but some will spring out again. Creeping inexorably up into the sunlight. On and on, ever out and up, powered by warmth and the watery sun as it struggles through the rain showers.
When the sun really decides to shine the whole valley bakes in a steam oven. A sweat lodge roofed in blue, solar powered. Juiced by acres of sodden foliage giving up moisture to the sun’s heated call. It is heating up now, the blaze of blue above me heralding a glorious day of sunlight and swimming. I need this so much.
Dawn
On a day like this, coolness is only to be had at the beach in the shade of the huge pohutukawa which leans out over the sandy shingle to sip the high tide twice a day. By 10 am it’s too hot to garden or eat, to do anything but swim. When the tide’s out I’ll get desperate for a swim and have to wade out through the shelly slime and mud until the water is thigh depth, cloudy and mysterious but cool. Chill compared to the air temperature but only slightly wetter than the air.
Oh cool. How the shivers crackle through my overheated skin and muscle. Breath gasping as I flop down into the soft cool embrace of my salty lover: the sea. I flail my arms about and struggle out in a crawl to the beginnings of the deep green amongst the yacht hulls.
Ropes clanging against the masts, clattering and squeaking in every breeze. The mooring ropes creaking against the Sampson-post and the rollers as the pull of the water changes. Yachts swinging slowly about. Bows always to the current and, at the top and bottom of the tide, akimbo. Staring idly and untidily at each other as the tide pauses. Hesitates for those breathless moments before the turn and rush of the moon tugging the vast waters towards or away from the bay.
Suddenly seaweed grips my shoulder in prickly springy hands as I swim by its slow drifting arms. My skin shuddering in fear of creeping evil I swim around a large jellyfish the size of a crystal fruit bowl. Its valves are pumping slow heartbeats of locomotion. It doesn’t know or care where it is or how to get away when the tide dashes it against the sand, abrading its feeding tentacles and swimming cilia. Waves splitting it into three mindless jellies, equilateral on the beach as if offering itself to us in three portions. Magnifying the grains through a natural lens of restrained water. Drying to a crisp dark film on the baking sand.
Stuart
Today I saw a dog pick up a jellyfish, to the threat of his ignorant jaws. Unaware of the numbing stingers hidden in the jelly’s fringes, the dog played with the solid goo of the dead jellyfish without obvious ill-effects. The dog was lucky though, because it wasn’t one of the worst, most dangerously potent of the jellyfish – the blue small Portuguese man-o’-war. Trailing a blistering blue – cerulean poison ribboned through the deep in a soft gentle gel which clings and tangles; dangling down, luring fish into its fatal forest. A pendant web of fire which touched – stepped upon on the beach or tangled onto the swimming limbs – causes agonising blisters, red-hot stinging and sometimes a nasty stun reaction and illness. I found one, dried out, lying on the hot sand and I placed it on my altar to the ancestors. Death and pain in one small mysterious package.
Dawn
I remind myself to be careful about jellyfish. These are large and easy to see. Probably not very dangerous to me but I avoid them anyway. Sometimes I will stop swimming and put out my hand and lay it on the curved silken top surface of the jellyfish. Feel it pulsing under my hand. Wonder if it has a heart or thought as it pumps away like a heart with strings, a transparent waterborne valentine to all the lovers of the world.
Stuart
She’s a romantic, yet indigenous too; when she swims it is as if she were in her native element. Maybe she is of Leaping Salmon totem too. Or, more likely, eel. Perhaps I could love her . . . maybe I need someone of my own kind, from my own country, to be my woman.
Uma was too . . . foreign, captured by her own culture, by her own people, quite literally. There’s nothing at all I can do to help that. Nothing. I don’t want to accept it but I must. How does that song go . . .? If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with? Hmmm. It has a good message that song.
Chapter 5 India
Dawn
‘Stu, tell me about India.’ We were lying on the beach and I had begun to burn for him. His lanky muscular frame, the easy way he has about him. Even his dreadlocks were somehow appealing when, worn by other men, they repelled me. His chest was covered in the most amazing tattoos of dragons, fish and magical symbols. Each one seemed to have a story that took us away on a journey into another world when he told it to me.
Mike wanted to go and get covered in tats the moment he saw the ones Stu has. God he’s such a try-hard! Thank goodness he’s gone back to university today. I was getting sick of his stupid questions all the time. ‘Dawwwn? Why have you got a Rastaman living in the spare room? Are you going to sleep with him?’ If I get that lucky I am not going to tell you, little brother. Go back to your clay!
The most sacred image Stu had on him was a tattoo of his totem Leaping Salmon. I’d never heard of a totem like that. I thought they were all bears and deer or cougar; but Stu said that he needed a totem which lived here, in his native land, as well as in the USA where he first connected with his totem.
He said that Leaping Salmon’s wisdom has become part of himself and so, like the salmon, he has come home to New Zealand to regenerate himself. Salmon swims upstream emotionally and receives divination messages. He said lots of other stuff too that I don’t remember but it’s impressive. Weird but impressive. More meaningful than how much beer he can scull all in one go.
‘Indiahhhh . . .’ The word ended in a sigh . . . he was silent for a while and then said, ‘I can’t really describe India. It’s too big, too complicated. Maybe the whole universe is contained in India. Most things good and evil are there in some way and the people are the greatest power of all.