Monterra's Deliciosa & Other Tales & (16 page)

The Refloat of D'Urbe Isle

Cluny McCrory drowned the digestive biscuit in his fifth cup of tea before noon, and dumped both in the sink. He was going crazy-bored with retirement after just six months home from the mainland, and had just decided to fall off the back of a ferry when he glanced at the page staring at him from
The Times
, held open by Daphne at the kitchen table, like some sort of a shield.
World mourns hero to the planet
. "I'm goin out," he said, and didn't hear the sigh of Daphne who, since he'd retired (
When's lunch? What're you doin now?),
had been troubled with fantasies of kitchen knives.

By the end of the day McCrory couldn't wait to take the ferry back to the mainland to check up on a few things. But his plans were made. He was going to salvage the sunken economy of the island and die someday a long time off with an obituary he'd be proud of. He knew a thing or two about energy so that was the direction his mind and energies took. He drafted a grant proposal to set up a plant to harness, store, and export energy from the wind, the one marketable resource that his island possessed.

He wasn't entirely original in his thoughts. The windmill farm had been in place for some years but was scheduled for dismantling, as the sound of the tall propeller-topped poles was now too many times quoted as "like a toilet on permanent flush", and they were now deemed to be unpopular, especially as they didn't help the local economy.

Once his plan was thoroughly costed, he went to the regional authority, and since he was who he was— not anyone important as such, but someone who knew how others had done things and gotten their way in the public works department—he knew how to get his proposal approved, and he did. Applauded by the regional authority like a magically appearing hand for an emptily flapping glove, McCrory's business/government partnership proposal was perfectly on message with Government's current policy. Everyone was happy. And this is said with no nudge, nudge. Everybody
was
happy, as the islanders were assured that this scraggy little island would finally be considered a model of something worthy, and that they would soon be middle class.

The corporation was duly formed—a co-operative with 80% of the inhabitants eager to be part of it, the other 20% being over 75 years of age. The co-operative members were mostly crofters on slim pickings, both for their sheep, and the prices being paid for sheep. The remainder of the co-operative was composed of bent-backed but hardy ex-lichen gatherers for the handloomed tweed trade, who'd been done out of their jobs by the boom in world demand for these lichen-dyed wools, which meant that their natural lichen dyes couldn't possibly supply the market, but had to be substituted by dyes made by substances that are originally natural in some form, but are no longer lichen-derived.

But back to the D'Urbe Isle Energy Export Co-operative. The seed money for the setup was awarded, some millions, matched monetarily to full by projections in the plan.

With a will, the inhabitants/co-operative owners got to work, Cluny McCrory directing. First—the office, with appropriate software installed for Just-In-Time and certified Best Practice operating mode.

Then they built a warehouse. The fierce winds made the building of it tricky, and draftiness the prime concern. So for efficiency, two hundred thousand tons of cement mix, three tons of epoxy, forty-thousand steel reinforcing bars and two shipments more worth of supplies were ferried over to a new dock that had been built, even before the office, to service the island's trade.

Then the receiving and sorting centre was built beside the dock.

The business was almost ready, but it needed its supplies. They came by container to the new container-holding facility that now occupied the western half of the island, the flatter side, though it had still needed blasting before it could be paved. Storms made these containers imperative, allowing the business to run smoothly all year, even if a ship could not dock due to the frequent storms. When a ship could arrive and leave, it would be loaded to the gills.

The containers came, and they were piled high—so high that the poles left from the windmills needed to be extended up half their height again.

The facility was ready. The seed money—those millions—had now been spent. The projections for expenditure had been calculated elegantly, with now everything finished and nothing necessary to buy for the business to launch itself into the future.

The Minister spoke. The islanders had one almighty wet and raucous night, including Cora Golightly and her cousins Alberta and Phyllida, the "office". The next day—Monday at 9am—everyone, sick in the head but thrilled in the brain, showed up at work. And the wind harvest and export business began.

The imported cargo was primarily composed of recycled plastic bags. They were piled high in the processing house. Since there was now no electricity on the island once the blades had been removed from the mills, an assembly line of workers wearing earmuffs picked up bags one at a time and put them to a spigot, which puffed air into the bag, powered by a diesel compressor.

Bags with holes went to the DISCARD side; bags without holes continued forward to USE.

The procedure for a USE bag was then as follows: a harvester, a co-op worker job descripted more exactly as a "collector" takes the bag to a pole, fits it over an open-weave metal basket pointing sideways, and then runs the open bag up the pole, positioning it so that it puffs completely open and fills, at which time the collector lowers the bag, takes it off the basket, and machine-assisted, packs it in a waterproofed box labelled "D'Urbe Isle Energy Export Co-operative: Export Quality Wind Energy" (in five European languages).

Previous test runs showed that each cake-box-size box could hold fifty bags, especially after the Finnish box makers suggested upping the grade of board to extra heavy corrugate so that the packing machine can compress the contents to provide the greatest space savings, thereby saving money, shipping space, and the environment—for it should go without saying, but few companies are this careful with their shareholder's money: the more efficiently a product is packed, the less boxes need to be made for the product—a win-win situation.

Once the wind harvest is packed and sealed, it is ready for export whenever weather permits.

Since the wind howls without letup on D'Urbe Isle, the co-operative has ideal work practices. They vote their own work hours, and are scathing about other sources that are so much less reliable, like sun.

The discarded bags might have been a problem as they are, unfortunately, a significant percentage of recycled plastic bags. But a quick run up the pole for each, and a release at the top, lets nature take care of the problem with its normal efficiency, if we only give it a chance. The ubiquitous whitecaps sink the half-puffed bubbles almost as soon as they alight on the water, or if they don't alight as the wind is in one of its truly efficient moods, the bags just disappear as so many little clouds scudding over the horizon.

Today D'Urbe Isle is a model economy. The mainland has solved an ugly issue of waste. And wind has been harvested in a lesson for us all: with lateral thinking and good business sense, we can bag for useful purposes, at least some of nature's antisocial habits.

And that obituary in
The Times
? On file, only needing particulars of date, cause of death, and detail of which spouse outlived the other.

The Apple

With a rolling crash so loud she looked behind her back to see if anyone was there, the apple tumbled down the hidden chute and hit the chromed stop, where it gleamed red. As red as the shiny machine, and much shinier than the mud-grimed linoleum floor outside the lunchroom.

She reached in and took the apple and it overfilled her hand. It looked real good. And at the price of a candy bar, this particular apple looked to be what her mom called "a bargain."

But it hadn't cost a nickel. It hadn't cost anything, except an experiment. An impulsive experiment. But one that worked, and was so exciting, that ...

That she couldn't tell anyone.

She was real ashamed.

And real excited. After all, this meant something.

But the apple had come to her free.

And that wasn't good.

"Did I steal it?" She stood there, looking at the machine and at the apple, till Mrs. Crawford, her second grade teacher from last year, noticed her as she was walking past. Mrs. Crawford clicked over on those high heels and bent down low.

"What's wrong, Celia? Did you wet your pants again?" she whispered.

Celia felt bad, because Mrs. Crawford had been her favorite teacher once she knew how hard it was for Celia to raise her hand, and then she'd just let her go whenever she needed to, without asking.

"No, Mrs. Crawford," Celia answered, as the first drop fell from an eye, and then her nose began to run, and then she "sounded like an old donkey," as her mom laughingly called it. Mrs. Crawford pulled what looked like a spotless handkerchief from some magic pocket, and said, "There there. Now it can't be that bad." And she took Celia's hand and led her to the empty assembly hall, with a "Why don't we talk."

By the time they sat down in adjoining hard wooden seats, Celia knew she had done a terrible thing. She didn't think of a preamble. She just said, "I put a piece of candy wrapper in the machine, and an apple came."

Mrs. Crawford turned her face away for a moment and Celia watched, knowing it was even worse than she had known. Maybe she was cursed for life, as Beverly Lamburn always screamed when some boy was bad. "Yur gonna be cursed for life!"

Maybe that was it. Maybe she was pre-cursed, her life just waiting to be tempted into doing that thing. As it was, she hadn't planned. It just happened because she finished the chocolate, and just screwed up the shiny tinfoil, and it looked so pretty, like a nickel, so she made it rounder and flatter, and then there was the machine, and she just dropped it right in. "Just like that!" as her mom always said about things that she'd buy on a notion, that she just had to have. Or times when visitors came unexpected. Or rain suddenly pounded on the roof in the middle of a bluesky day. "Just like that." No explanation. A fact as hard as the sidewalk.

But that was making excuses. She knew. She did it.

But now there was Mrs. Crawford turned Celia's way again, with those beautiful, gray, great big eyes, somber as always.

"Is this the apple, Celia?"

Celia handed it to her.

"It's a nice apple." said Mrs. Crawford. "Did you not have a nickel?"

"No, ma'am. I have my lunch money and my allowance in my pocket."

"Then ..." Mrs.Crawford scrundled up her forehead, "Why, little honeysuckle?" She fished out the soggy hanky and handed it to Celia.

"Because it just happened," Celia sobbed. "Just like that."

Mrs. Crawford smiled. To Celia at that moment, she looked holy, especially when she asked, soft like private prayer, "Do you think it will happen again?"

Celia wanted with all her heart to absolve her horribleness, to never be a thief again. To be as good a person as Mrs. Crawford, so when she answered, she answered in complete trust, love, and horror. "Maybe."

Mrs. Crawford's painted eyebrows twitched. "Maybe you better talk to Mr. Abernathy."

So she took Celia to the principal's office, and there Celia met Mr. Lester Abernathy, and he agreed with her self-assessment of horribleness, especially the cursed-for-life part.

The Rest Cure

"Misanthrope's Rest", as he called it, did pique my curiosity. Adrian could tell a story and he hadn't finished this one yet: "Once out of the shrill of the street, everything ceases to have an edge—all is softness. The carpets—thick as Irish paddocks. The walls—muffled as a well-dressed castle. The lighting—suffused with that natural tint that imparts an aura of beneficence to the most boiled-eyed old misanthrope. It's for you, Jack."

I cocked an eyebrow, curious but not sold.

"Nothing disturbs one," he purred in a surprisingly tea and toast "English," of Mrs. Percival's small and luxurious lodging house, five minutes' walk from the British Museum. "No hail fellow well met, no banging bedstead in the next room. A haven of unfriendliness in a cloud of softness."

I was planning to seriously think it over when he said: "You won't have anyone to bother you at all," and he winked, with the comic leer of the knowingly repulsive man.

"Sold," I laughed.

This has always been a problem, with my looks. On campus I can hardly get any work done at all if anyone knows I'm in my office, and in the library—forget it. In a big lonely city, it is even worse. I have always had a problem with women, especially since I love them.

So I picked Mrs. Percival's as the base for my research. My learned colleague and best friend—the crowd averse and immensely unattractive Assistant Professor Adrian T. Gissing confided it to me as "a privilege for only the select few"—urged me to it in fact, and recommended me. Only the recommended would be allowed to stay, he told me, even though the place cost enough that you would think it was money Mrs. Percival was after. But it was nothing as vulgar as that.

"Tone, dear boy," Adrian mocked her, though he was my reference. "She only likes those with taste and quiet. But then ..." he explained, "she's almost motherly. So comfortable, and your meals will be brought to your room, so you won't have the excuse of going out in public to find a bite."

He was subtle in his own way, by what he didn't say. But he knew as well as I, that if I didn't get this work done, there would be no tenure for me.

~

"Ah, Doctor ... dear boy," Mrs. Percival murmured approvingly as she met me at the door, her few little clucks of welcome as soft and muffled as everything else in this unnamed Victorian townhouse. Her jewelry fit the place—a plaited hair bracelet, and on her fingers, no rings at all.

And Adrian was right. It was quieter than a chrysalis, and softer than the inside of a cocoon.

Even the sharpness of street smells and common perfumes must have been deemed vulgar by this gentle lady. As I bent to my bags, I sniffed more purposely. The space was suffused with a soft scent quite different to the cliché rose potpourri I had expected. It reminded me of something almost human ... almonds. Warm almonds.

My head was bent as I was writing my name in her book when I felt my hair sharply tugged. "Very acceptable, Adrian," she murmured.

I looked in her eyes, and she demurred with the hint of a smile. "Sometimes Adrian is inclined to embroider the truth," she said. "I just had to check."

Adrian? But looking at her now, I saw that there was in the middle of her face, a nose with a distinct cleft to it.

Was she ... but she turned away quickly, and was suddenly as impenetrable as the silence of the place.

"Remember," she said, her head bent over some smoothly opened drawer. "No disturbances, and we will have a lovely stay, won't we?"

And she placed my key on the green baize counter, and sat with her back to me, pointedly absorbed in an old book with deckled pages.

I took my bags up in the old fashioned cage lift, Mrs. Percival not offering help. It was refreshing to be treated just that little bit offhand.

I found my room halfway down the hall—a room that a woman might possibly have exited as she walked away from me toward the stairs.

Maybe it is reflexive, but I stopped to look.

Magnificently lordotic—she had a seahorse's back. One that demanded lacing, or at the very least, a hundred jet buttons marching from the nape of her milk-tinted neck down to the deep dishing curve at her waist, arching at the swell at her coccyx.

Hair with the natural curl of small children, no individual curls as such, but more of a cloud begging the sun to light from behind. It was an aureole around her head.

Her ankles in sheer silk, echoed the curves of her back.

 I was just putting the key to the door, and missing it, when she turned around, and the key shoved into the hole up to the hilt.

"'xcuse," she said, her breath landing on my cheek. "I seem to have dropped an earring."

And with that she bypassed me into the room and pulled the door closed behind her.

My bags were beside me in the hall. She carried only a feedbag-type handbag. I heard her moving things about, drawers opening, the bed ruffled, and it sounded like being remade.

Then faintly, a tinkle of water, and a toilet flush.

The door opened. She smiled with a confidence I'd never seen.

"Found," she said, patting her left ear, where a diamond stud winked. Her ears were pierced.

"Glad to be of service," I said, smiling back but she had turned already.

Her back said goodbye. Incredible.

She was hard to believe. I suddenly hated what I was here for.

Work.

She had closed the door behind her. I crammed the key in the lock again and shoved myself into the room that like all the others in this hotel for loners, was a comfortable-looking single.

One week's work would do it, I had calculated. Beyond that, I couldn't afford to stay in London. This place was my indulgence, so I shut my mind to imagination. If I took the time to think of seahorse backs, I would never get my mind to work.

I dumped one bag by the door, and threw the other on the bed so I could unpack my corduroy pants, already creased, a button-down shirt for each day, etc. I had the handful of underpants and socks clutched to shove in the top drawer, but when I opened it, there was already something there, and it wasn't a phone book or a bible.

In the middle front of the drawer there was one stocking, very fine and semi-sheer, white with a pattern of flitting doves, and a back seam from heel to I couldn't see. It was half rolled in the crouch of a stocking that's just been taken off the foot.

Put it up to my nose. It smelled like roasted almonds—and toes. It smelled like her.

My right hand, still holding the clump of underpants and socks, dropped them on the floor, so it could open the second drawer down.

A white pasteboard box, tied with a bow of blue-black hair. In the box, a golf ball resting on a cloud of blond curls. I have blond curls.

I opened the two lower drawers to find nothing there but clean wood.

The bedside table was chintz-covered but naked underneath.

The wardrobe held nothing except my clothes and a clothing brush.

My suitcase, I clamped shut and shoved by the wall. Then I stripped the bed to the bottom sheet.

At the foot, a spray of snowdrops, still damp.

I buttoned the top button of my shirt tight, and stuck the spray in there, so the flowers bent to my throat. And continued.

In a tea cup, a child's cardboard toy that when tipped, gargled out "Nonny, nonny."

I sat on the floor, on the pile of buttermilk-yellow counterpane and dawn-pink sheet, tipping the toy back and forth, "Nonny, nonny, Nonny, nonny ..." while my mind explored her body. The flowers grew warm against my neck, their tongues tickling my Adam's apple.

Crawling over to the bureau, I reached up for the stocking and the white box, and sat with my back against the drawers.

Box in my lap, open to see the golf ball heavy on the golden curls.

I pulled the stocking over my face, the toe of the foot now the crown of my head. Smelling it feeling the inside of what it must be like to feel the outside ...

My fingertips explored the insides of the cloud of curls, her curls, my curls. Our smell now mixed.

My left foot fell asleep. Outdoors, it was already dusking.

I rolled the stocking off my face, knotted it around my neck, and went to explore the bath.

In the pile of towels, a little crystal vial: Drink me.

~

I woke in a bed. There was my suitcase by the wall. It was my room at Mrs. Percival's. The light was dim, and when I turned my head to the windows the curtains were closed, but my vision was taken up with a back facing me.

The seahorse-curved back of Her. Sitting up on my bed, her back tightly whaleboned and laced with pink silk straps, the curve of her derriere blossomed rosy and naked into the folds of sheet.

I felt myself—naked.

Looking at her, I remembered ... nothing.

"Was it good for you?" I murmured, as this always brings an encore.

She got up and walked around the foot of the bed, bent down without bending her knees, to pick up something I couldn't see. Maybe an earring because it wasn't an article of clothing. Straightening up, she came up my side of the bed and turned away, opening and closing the door behind her, somehow in the whole movement, never showing the front of herself to me at all.

I hadn't heard her voice again, but it was her. And she went out of the room wearing nothing but those silk and whalebone stays.

My clothes were in a pile by the bed. I tore them on and ran into the hall to see the top of her head as she descended the stairs.

I wanted to yell after her. Run and stop her. But "nothing disturbs one" warned me of making a scene. It was still early as the dimness in my room showed. And the hall was so quiet you could hear the electricity in the soft, hidden lighting.

Suddenly I smiled. My reputation must have proceeded me. That Adrian! I could imagine his eagerness to hear this installment of "Tales from the Sheets." And what name would he pick for this one? With his generalist approach, so irrelevant now, but good for his inspiration, it could be anything from a maiden to a wench, to a gentlewoman wronged. I know because he'd tell me their tales.

This was after I had told him the story, though. For Adrian has no true tales of his own. How could he? His skin is volcanic, his teeth typical for a British pug, and his nose, a beautifully risen dinner roll, the kind with the cloven top.

So I shared my experiences with him. The him who then turned each one into an epic tragedy. "Why do you always have to dump them?" he asked me. "No one is even Juliet."

I knew about Juliet. And I could see how he compared my girls to the ones he described—the knight's wife who slept finally with her own son to have someone to sleep with, the sultan's concubine who got shirty about not being picked, so he had her bundled into a sack and thrown into the Bosphorus. The morning noon and night beddings of the hero of the Victorian classic, "My Secret Life." I liked this anonymous hero because he was obviously attractive to women, but he knew how, the more passionate they are, the faster they stale.

How do you explain to a starving man, that after the feast, the same flesh, re-hashed, is just that? But Adrian seemed to find succor in his romances, and the stories he told me were pretty good, if you're into vales of tears. If Adrian thought he was going to change me, or that he could perhaps, vicariously share a long-lasting marriage of souls when I saw the glory of love requited, he was sorely misjudging the effect of his parablizing.

At first when he named my women, they were all Shakespearean tragic heroines, and he didn't tell me the stories till I asked him to remind me of just why he thought that particular name was relevant. Then, he started going all over the centuries. There was James Joyce's Molly Bloom—all I remember from Joyce was someone sniffing at his pocket boutonniere of a pair of used women's panties, and I only remember that because that was the only part of the book my professor seemed to remember. There were ancient Greek heroines, dumped Edwardian beauties, ultimately soiled lilies from imperial courts of China and Japan.

Adrian roams all over the world and history in his sick fascination for hard-done-by women. I would have hated taking his class, English 101. A generalist to the core, he reads everything, it seems, from the beginning of time, till about 1930, everything "modern" being "trash." Many of the tragic heroines he's blamed on me were "the bard's," a term he uses with reverence, though it embarrasses me to be in his presence when he speaks this way.

He gave me a book for my birthday. "Read and learn."

He is incorrigible. Shakespeare's poetry.

But he never said, "Don't tell me your tales." He lapped them up hungrily, and mostly, transmogrified them into his tragedies, beautifully told with his actor's voice. I was a good audience, and he seemed to take satisfaction in the closest thing he got to romance in real life.

"Fie on you!" he exploded once, about one little redhead, "They're just wenches to you."

I giggled in spite of trying to maintain a serious face, because wench was a perfect description for her.

He struck his desk with his soft white palm. "Oh, why can't some pale hard-hearted wench, like Rosaline, torment you so, that you will sure run mad."

He was getting either funnier or more annoying by the moment. I cracked my knuckles. "Is that supposed to be a curse?"

He peered at me with that look that makes you wonder whether your front teeth are dotted with poppy seeds. "Doesn't anything ring a bell with you?"

"Don't you read anything that isn't a tragedy?"

"Of course."

"What?"

"Lots of things. The world of literature, you know—"

"Cut that crap, Adrian," I laughed. "What."

He took off his glasses. So corny.

"If you must know," he said. "But this is just between us."

"Of course," I assured him. He knew I wouldn't tell. I don't have anyone else to talk to.

"Barbara Cartland."'

It couldn't be.

"Another of your Elizabethans?"

He finally laughed, cocking his head in a manner that I think he meant to be debonair. "Modern trash. I thought you would know."

His superiority irks sometimes. "I told you. I don't read trash."