Love and the Dark Night

FOURTEEN

The doctor peeled off the bandage so gently that I couldn’t even feel it except for a sudden coolness when it was off my forehead and when the doctor applied a piece of cotton wool drenched in antiseptic liquid and wiped the crusted ointment away.

The doctor got up, let the assistant apply the appointment afresh with a cotton swab and then dressed the wound with white cotton gauze that he wrapped around his forehead before fixing it to the back of my head with a pair of clips.

All the while I remained still, my eyes closed, the smell of medicine floating in my mind like little pieces of candy clouds, listening to the scraps  of conversation floating around in the room between the doctor and his assistant.

And sometimes Tessa who must have entered quietly standing by the door watching. 

“How much longer do you think,” Tessa said.

“We can't take any chances,” the doctor said. “He is getting along fine but we have to keep on changing the dressing and applying the ointment.”

“The wound has missed his eyes,” the assistant said. “He was lucky.”

“Does it hurt him?” Tessa said.

“I think so,” the doctor said. “But we have to give him medicines to numb the pain, to help him fall asleep.”

“Thank you,” she said. “I’m glad you are not taking any chances.”

I kept on watching through half open eyes the assistant putting a hand under my head and helping me get up for the pills. Eyes closed I swallowed them with room temperature water from a glass which sat on the bedside table.

Tessa looked at me. “You sleep now,” she said.

I could hear assistant shut the briefcase and with the doctor both walked out of the room, their steps receding away into the woods of my past.

“When you get up dinner will be on the table by your bed. That was Tessa’s voice.

I turned to thank her but she stopped me. “You don't have to talk now she said. Let's wait till you get better.”

As days passed the pills began to work. From the moment Tessa left with the doctor and his assistant, I slipped into a deep sleep that pulled me right through the evening and well into the night when I woke up, drained.

Dinner helped me. The plate was warm. I pulled the table to the bed and ate, rinsed my mouth with a glass of water and went back to sleep again. Unlike the first night, when images from my past haunted my sleep, hammering against my closed eyelids, now it was more uneventful. Perhaps it was the medicine, perhaps it was the pain I was not sure but I realised I slept more soundly now, not even a turning during the night. In fact, when I woke up in the morning, I found that the sheet I had pulled over myself in the night was still spread straight, there being only a few wrinkles here and there, some above my knee and where my toes were. The pillow wasn't turned or twisted, not a single crease in its white case. Did somebody I know come in the middle of the night and with her soft hands smoothen the sheet?

Sleeping and waking and sleeping again, eating in between, all this happened with a hazy and far away picture of a figure with a shaved head, a middle aged lady, someone I did not know. She passed through the corridor of my half-sleep-half-wakefulness world, stopping by and slipping away, compelling me to stretch my hand and hold hers so as not to leave me. This life of routine settled into my system. It was a matter of days and nights before I began getting accustomed to the objects around me, the same objects that, a short while ago, so strongly held my fascination.

Until one morning when I discovered the view from the window. The view of several young ladies and a scaffolding of sorts being brought inside the gate.

 *

Later I will wonder how I missed this at first. Wasn't this the first thing I noticed when I woke up in Tessa's strange house? There was a scaffolding here, and i think i saw a lady bound to it, and a half dressed man, his chest bare, stood in swimming trunks. He came forward to the bound girl and smelling her dusky complexion, he sniffed her simultaneously. Now and then, in between pauses, he gently clawed her with his finger nails. He bit her on her shoulder, once on the left, then immediately trailing his touungue along her throat, he bit on the right shoulder. He sucked the side of her throat, he bit, he sucked. She moaned, and it seemed she was in half pain and pleasure, I mean her moans demonstrated it with her mouth half open, her whimpers coming in soft soothing fashion. Wasn't this the same window through which the light from the bulb reflected on the girl’s breasts?

So many times I have walked up and down the room, treading softly across the carpet to the window, and from the reflection on the glass saw not one, but several women. I heard their names being moaned out – Meg, Melinda, Moll, March, Maureen and Kate. So many times, so many times I saw their reflection making love, and then a croaking voice reached out to my ears: the master, the deck-washer, the boatswain, and I

The gunman and his friend,

We loved Moll, Meg, Marion, and Margery

But none of us cared for Kate.

So was Kate the one standing at the corner covering herself with the curves of her body with her flimsy veil?

Kate had a gutter mouth,

And would shout to my people, “Go to hell!”

She didn’t like wet fields smell like tar,

But liked it okay when a tailor took her to bed.

So go to fields, boys, and let her go to hell!

*

Did these questions matter this morning as I stood near the window and looked out?

Both instincts and common sense told me I should see the street below and because I was standing high up, higher than I had ever been, everything we saw appeared smaller, trucks like cars, the roads like lanes, the people like insects. But this was not what I saw. Instead the sky both above and below stretching in front, in bands of colour white and blue, static at first and then bending and mixing into yellow-red.

I lowered my eyes, the same endless expanse, not even the faintest sign, the vaguest blur of green or brown or black of the earth below to break the whiteness of the sky. 

Although my feet were firmly on the carpet and I could feel its familiar rough-smooth texture, I felt I was suspended in mid air, or flying then plummeting down into a sea, sluggish and heavy into which I splashed without a sound and began to drown, the water filling my mouth, my lungs, my entire body. 

I stumbled, my head reeling.

I held the edge of the chair to steady myself and closed my eyes, hoping that by doing so I could shut out the distortion that had suddenly, blindingly overwhelmed my world. I opened my eyes and with my back to the window walked to the bed to lie down with the more familiar shapes. Pillows, the flat surface of the sheet, the reassuring rustle of their fabric against my skin, the hard reliable edges of my bed.

Was I being stupid as I looked at everything on the reflection of the glass?

Soon a force was pulling me, dragging me. A slow drag. Drag. Stop. Drag stop. My eyes half opened, I was made to stand up, but my legs couldn’t hold me. A piece of rope went around my arms and when I looked up, my eyes fell on my arms held by female hands, their tapered nails light pink. My arms were held up by ropes attached to a frame, not a frame but the scaffolding. A hand gestured and Meg, Melinda, Moll, March and Kate appeared. They stood around me.

One of them poured oil from a tube into the proffered hand and applied it on my chest. Her hand slipped over the smooth surface of my skin and even the hair on my chest mixed with the transparent gel. While she stopped now and then in the midst of her work, another lady with big breasts ran her twin orbs over my back, sitting down, standing up. Another one, dark-haired, looked at me with her misty eyes and ran her tongue over my left arm and forearm. One more arrived, nude as the others, holding a tray. It had a slender glass with light orange drink with a straw in it and a slice of lime. She held it in front of my mouth. But finding me simply standing, looking at them and allowing my manhood to rise, she sipped through the straw and resting her mouth on mine she gently poured the drink from her mouth into mine. Another one came forward, bent down in front of me and coiled her fingers around my phallus. Which was March and which was Melinda and Kate and Moll, I didn’t know but all I cared for was Meg. She had the looks of someone I could make out making strange flitters in my mind.

The door opened and closed. The whispers were not in my head but now they were coming out from the five girls. They looked at each other and they only showed their teeth in way of a smile, but each of their smiles were whispered giggles to me. They sighed and giggled and they laughed and giggled. They laughed and giggled and they cackled and giggled. Their light laughter opened doors after doors.

“Everyone makes a mistake the first time.” Someone’s voice reached my ears. She walked to the window, and as she did so her hair fallen to her shoulders passed by my face in one smooth wave and the smell of shampoo swooned me. But the girls continued with their work, rubbing me gently and kissing and fondling me all over.