Exciting Times!

Just come out of the spare room – used to be a dining room; turned it into a small gym. Nothing posh; bench, weights, treadmill and multi-gym – all squeezed in amongst packing cases, computers and photography gear. Bit of a mess, but does the job. Can watch Roy Orbison and Bruce Springsteen on my Mac whilst busting a gut on the weight bench. Kids bought me Black and White Nights for Christmas, so it’s up with the volume and do nostalgia stuff with my air guitar. Got to take it easy with the weights though, hurt my shoulder chain-sawing logs in the forest.

 Like me, the Black and White Nights crew are all a lot older now; k.d. lang, Costello, James Burton and the rest. Enjoy watching the crowd watching Orbison – cigarette smoke swirling around the stage lights and amplifiers. Health and Safety would throw a fit. At least it gave the place an atmosphere. Good days. Reminds me of the sixties; Triumph Bonneville parked outside, Chelsea boots and leather bomber jacket to go with the spray-on jeans and white T-shirt. Girls with big skirts and bigger slaps if you stepped out of line. Exciting times, when the only coke I knew of came in a glass and smoking it up meant twenty Chesterfields and a hacking cough in the morning.

Fond farewells to Wankie Coalfields.

... Not a lot happened with Gloria; guess I just wasn’t old enough. Never forgot her though – that sort of puppy smell when she pulled my head inside her cardigan. Anyway, things moved on. Mother fell out with her sister-in-law and we left Wankie. The mango trees, swimming pool and first love faded behind. Our sun-bleached Morris Minor went bravely into the heat and onto a road we had never seen before. Mother sat with her fifty-box of Matinee cigarettes clutched to her bosom and an austere stare for everything beyond the windscreen. She had the quarter window fully open to suck out her smoke and fag ash. The back seat, piled up like some pawn shop counter, left just enough space for me.

‘What in God’s name have they done to the middle out of the road?’

‘It was built that way on purpose.’ My father did his best.

‘Without a middle?’ Mother retorted.

Dad nodded and I leaned between the two front seats for a better view. Two, single strips of tar macadam stretched away to the front like wobbly liquorice sticks in the heat haze.

‘Called a strip road. Built during the recession. Saved the government a fortune.’

‘And what happens when we meet a car coming the other way?’ She grabbed at her seat. ‘Like right now!’

The car bombed towards us, whipping up dust from the missing bit in the middle. A black Chevrolet; all chrome and leering headlamps – the car from Hell.

‘For God’s sake pull over before we all die!’

We closed to within a hundred yards of the Chevy before both cars gave up their respective ‘right hand strip’; with barely the length of an outstretched arm between us, we passed as stately ships in the night. The Chevy driver waved and smiled and mother retrieved her cigarette from its neat little burn in the carpet. For the next fifty miles no one spoke...

Sons of Africa; a slightly raunchy extract:

... Sannie waded out to where the water ran fast against her legs. Mathew lay on his side, the heel of his hand to his chin and watched her dip the bucket beneath the surface. Her dress was wet to a foot above her knees and Mathew stared at the transparency of the cloth, tipping the brim of his hat to hide his eyes.

‘Do you not swim, meneer?’

‘I do swim,’ he told her, ‘if I were of a mind to. What about you?’ he flinched at a sudden tightness in his stomach.

‘Sometimes,’ she told him. ‘Sometimes when the sun is hot I swim for the water to keep me cool.’ She set down the bucket. ‘And now the sun is hot, but that is not why we came here. Is that not so, meneer?’

Mathew shook his head. The words stuck in his throat. Sannie had already loosened the buttons of her bodice, on tiptoe she lifted away her dress – then let it fall to the ground; a fragile wisp of cotton.

Without speaking, Sannie moved away from him and found a ridge of soft sand just beneath the stream’s surface – she followed it out to where the water swirled at its deepest – dark, forbidding eddies about the juncture of her legs.

‘Am I not to your liking, meneer?’  Now her breasts were tipped to a dark and trembling pink by the stroke of fast water.

‘More than anything,’ Mathew croaked, and not for a second could he tear his eyes from her.

‘Then I would like it very much if you were to stand beside me.’

Mathew stood up and looked back at the way they had come – the canvas tops of the wagons were barely visible through the trees and he could still hear the solid strike of an axe to the base of a sweet thorn.

‘I will turn my back for you,’ she encouraged. ‘Then I will count to ten.’

He hesitated a moment longer.

‘Three, four, five, six…’

He dropped the Colt on a tussock of grass and stripped off his shirt and boots.

‘…seven, eight…’

He reached her on the count of ten – her hair a black and gleaming cloak about her shoulders. ‘You can touch me if you wish,’ breathed Sannie, her voice soft but now unsteady – trembling like reeds to deep running currents.

Mathew wrapped his arms about her waist so that she could lean against him, her head against his chest and with her hands behind her back she reached for him inside the water. She felt him waken, slowly at first, then turned to face him and still her fingers worked their magic so that his eyes rolled in their sockets like those of a lovesick bull for a field of heifers.

‘Past those reeds,’ she whispered into his open mouth and led him with the current to where the stream shallowed. The bank, by that last seasonal flood had been spread with a white arc of virgin sand.

Sannie pushed him down, still with her face to his and with her tongue so very much alive inside his mouth that he was forced to hold her off to catch his breath.

‘Lie still!’ she laughed, and pinned his arms against the sand. ‘Now you are mine and I will have whatever I wish from you.’

Mathew closed his eyes, but not completely so that he was still able to make out the exquisite shape of her mouth whenever she lifted her face from his – and when she moved over him her breasts brushed against his chest and left whatever he tried to say stuck fast in his throat.

‘Be quiet,’ she whispered, and smiled at him through a halo of sunlight, ‘the time for talking is long past.’ She was so very clearly in control and delighted his senses in ways that he had never imagined – taking him on thunderous wings to the very brink of ecstatic vistas, then expertly brought him back with a sudden, experienced releasing of those slender, wicked fingertips. ‘Do you like what I am doing for you, meneer?’

‘Oh yes,’ whispered Mathew, ‘I surely like what you’re doing to me, miss Sannie.’

‘And what if my hand does this?’ she drew her nails across the muscled flat of his stomach and laughed delightedly when it twitched from her teasing. ‘Then again,’ she whispered close to his ear, ‘this might be even better?’ She lowered her face to chest, deliberately taking one hard nipple between her teeth so that he shuddered beneath her.

‘Someone might hear you,’ she admonished and laughed with him, but with a wicked edge to her voice. ‘Your mother would kill me for what I am doing to her son.’

‘She would kill us both,’ grinned Mathew, and now there was softness in her eyes.

 ‘You are more handsome than all the others. Stronger – and bigger down here,’ she giggled, and reached for him.

Now her hand rolled back and forth, brushing between them, coaxing the heat she had kindled from a warm, quiescent flame to a towering inferno, firmly filling her hand until her girlish, slender fingers could no longer encompass the girth of him. Again, Sannie leaned forwards and put her lips to his ear so that her voice was a hot and roaring wind.

‘For this you will remember well of me, meneer’ – then with an expert angling of her wrist she guided him between her legs and loosed the stallion free for its first unhindered run at the open veld...