ONE DAY!
Since including our serialised story Sunshine in OC Life, we’ve heard from a number of local writers about publishing some of their writings. Here’s a piece from Gilly that caught our eye. Hope you like it as much as we did.
ONE DAY!
Flickering candlelight caressed Rajeeds’ glowing body as he swayed to and fro to the haunting tones of the sitar, with gestures and movements straight from the latest Bollywood extravaganza, his inhibitions and his impeccable manners laying among the clothing strewn about the polished wooden floor.
A glistening jewel of perspiration caught my eye as it trickled down his chest, clinging lovingly in its’ slow descent over satin muscles and rippled abdomen, to vanish into the saffron folds of his crisp, linen loincloth.
The heady mix of sandalwood and sitar filled my senses. The taste of cinnamon and spice stung my lips as I imagined the dhoti joining the pile of discarded robes on the floor, and my gaze continued the path to shining golden thighs, sinuously hypnotising in cobra-like grace as he twirled and turned to the music.
His smouldering eyes burned through me, and my head began to spin with the spicy-sweet scent of the room.......!
Suddenly the shrill, sharp call of the blackbird, a lone bugler sounding reveille outside my window, snatched away my magic carpet of dreams with the flourish of a matador, taking with it my bronzed Lothario, the candlelight and music, and leaving nothing but the lingering scent of sandalwood and a taste of spice on my lips and a sense of something lost that would never be found again.
The dawning of reality swept over me in a wave of sadness, encouraged further by the insistent trumpeting from beyond my window... Rotten little black wretch...You could have waited a little bit longer... just until I felt the warmth of Rajeeds’ embrace at least! You’d better be gone by the time I get up, or you’re going to pay for that early wake-up call, dragging me out of a lovely sleep to troop another weary day, plodding through this banal existence that serves as a life.
Oh! Rajeed! Rajeed! Wherefore art thou Rajeed!
Get up! You moaning mound of misery! There is a shiny new day beyond this dim-lit room! Who knows what adventure awaits?... Adventure???... Hummph! That’ll be the day! The only adventure you’re going to get is when the washing machine decides to get stuck on ‘fill’ and floods the laundry and everything within a three room radius!... Oh! Just get up and stop moaning!
I think there is something inherently pointless in getting out of bed in the mornings and trying to keep up the pretence that one is “alive!”
Firstly, the minute your feet hit the floor you know something is amiss... How does that song go? The hip-bone’s connected to the thigh bone...The thigh bones connected to the knee bone! Or something like that! Then how come my tailbone isn’t connected to anything and the whole bag of bones gets the death wobbles as soon as I stand up? Secondly, once you have the shimmy shakes under some sort of control, and you make it dodderingly to the bathroom, then you have to install all the things that a “living’ being should already have installed!... Put your teeth in!... NO! First put your glasses on so that you can find the teeth, and it isn’t the sink plug you’re trying to fit in your mouth!
Pull, push, tuck, fold, and squeeze until all the bits that bulge, dangle, wobble, protrude and bounce are well and truly under control before you greet the day. Not to mention the battle with thinning, greying hair that either sticks out like a birch-broom in a fit, or hangs as limp as an old man’s fancy... Oh! Sigh!
Once you have it all gathered together, and you think you can manage so long as no one comes knocking at the door just when you take the pesky teeth out for a minute to ease sore gums, and you forget and greet them with your ‘wicked witch of the west’ face, then it’s time to get on with the day!
Breakfast!... After all the dreams are well and truly washed down the basin with the nights’ grit from eyes and face, and the last thought of bronzed thighs vanishes with the wrinkled vision peering back at you from the mirror... Somehow, I’m not very hungry this morning... A quick cup of Liptons to wash down a couple of painkillers, and a mega vitamin in the hope of resurrecting some forgotten energy from somewhere past does little to pull me out of this listless frame of mind.
What is there to look forward to, another day of the same old drudgery? Doing the same old things, over and over, day in and day out, ad nauseum... till even the toast getting burnt is a welcome diversion from dull monotony!
My life is uninspiring! I am a frumpy house-frau!... What a lovely word... ’frumpy’... it describes me exactly! (Frump- from the Middle Dutch ‘verrompelen’; To wrinkle!). I wonder why we don’t have English words that are so tersely descriptive? The English are such a stuffy lot, guarding their use of language as carefully as they guard their behaviour. Must keep the upper lip stiff!... Never let your guard down! I wonder how they ever manage to procreate when they are so prim and proper? They should take lessons from Rajeed... now he could teach them a thing or two about loosening up!... Dab a little cinnamon behind the ears, and liberally apply whipped cream, and they couldn’t help but drop more than their áitches’… Hmmmn! Now that has possibilities!... Now there you go again, off in dreamland! Get off your bum and get about the boring business of the day!
Maybe I could run away! Just vanish from this place and disappear off into the outback! There is endless desert out there I could get lost in. No one would miss me! It would be like a trek into the Sahara, riding on a camel into glorious red sunsets with my bronzed Rajeed to attend to my every whim, (if only in my mind)... No tedium to plague me anymore, no time card to punch, no gut-busted washing machines or burnt toast... I wonder if I can buy a camel on my Visa?
Shopping!... If I could despise anything more than housework, it must be shopping! Especially when all the kids are on holidays, and some snotty-nosed little darling wipes his fingers on the back of your skirt in the crush at the deli, while you patiently wait for the old lady in the spotted dress, who is first in line ahead of twenty others to make up her mind whether she wants shaved ham or ham slices. “No! I think I’ll have the corned beef instead, deary!” she mumbles, after the girl has weighed and wrapped the ham, to a collective sigh from a score of shuffling bodies, and an ear piercing shriek from the brat who now has his sticky finger firmly stuck in the crack between the counters ! Serve you right, you little menace!... I wonder if my wishing bad things upon him did that? Hope so!... I’m sorry, I can’t help smiling! At last, a bright spot in the day!
It occurs to me that my life really is pathetic when the pain of another living being is my only source of joy! So in a rather contrite frame of mind I finally reach the counter and my turn, and don’t even get annoyed when they tell me that the customer before me has bought the last barbeque chicken, and there won’t be any more ready for another hour and a half!...... I didn’t want chicken anyway!... All those greasy calories! “I’ll have fifty grams of devon, thanks!” I mumble... grumbling inwardly at the thought of devon sandwiches, instead of chicken salad for lunch, and suddenly the taste of cinnamon haunts my thoughts, and the fragile memory casts aside the need for chicken and restores the secret smile to my face.
Out in the car park, dodging the brats who use the supermarket ramp for skateboarding becomes a lesson in the modern use of four-letter words, and they teach me a few I have never heard before... wonder if they are in my dictionary? Maybe wishing bad things will work on them as well! A large and beautifully tattooed Maori fellow with a body to rival Rajeed, and a grasp of lout language fit to scare the skateboard right out from under the toughest brat, came to the rescue of all the little old grannies coming up the ramp after me, and with a few well chosen four letter expletives sent the brats scurrying to the sanctuary of the plaza over the road, and the grannies red-faced away into the maze of cars in the car park.
Good God! Is that the time? Here I am dawdling over my devon sandwich, and waiting for John to rescue Marlena for the umpteenth time from the clutches of the evil Stephano and it’s nearly time for work... Darn! Just when I was getting interested... Oh well! I s’pose nothing much will change till tomorrow, and if she gets rescued, in a months’ time she is only going to be kidnapped again. How does she manage to have so much excitement in her life?... Maybe you have to change husbands every other week before things become interesting... Pity I don’t have one of those to change, or I could give it a try and see if the boredom goes away and life becomes a little spicier...... Sorry, Marlena... I have to turn you off and go and earn my living! Some of us don’t have the same luxuries as others... Oh, by the way... try putting on forty pounds, that’ll get rid of Stephano in a big hurry!
Work! Who mentioned work? The word denotes doing something different and more satisfying, less boring than one’s usual routine! But the truth is that it is just a case of doing the same thing in a different place. The remuneration is fine, and the work is no great hardship, nor is it dirty work, but there is no escaping the tedium of doing the same things over and over and over.
The only advantage of work is that it gives me lots of time to wander in my fantasies, and this little indulgence helps the day to pass. Work! What can you say about work? It appears to me in my casual observations of others at my work place that the tedium and lack of inspiration that I feel is not mine alone to bear. Take for instance the chap in the office at the far end of the corridor, whose diplomas and degrees and various other accolades decorate the walls of his ‘den.’ His educational status and his many sojourns abroad in the interests of his work should make for an exciting, happy and fulfilling life... but no! Every morning, without fail, this privileged individual with the world at his fingertips meticulously constructs and folds a tiny paper boat, whose sole purpose is to deliver his used tea bag over the edge of his desk into the waste paper basket. Never a paper plane! Never just toss it in the bin. Always the absentminded folding of the tiny boat while he sips his tea and ponders the tedium of HIS day!
Boredom obviously has no preference for gender or educational status and another desktop proudly proclaims in deeply scratched letters, “I am so bored I could eat my ear-wax!” and it is added to each day with careful tracing of the letters in a different colour, to further imprint the writers misery firmly in his mind. The vagaries of tedium affect us all, from the lady who doodles on every conceivable space, to the person who just sits and stares out the window, then gets into a huge panic as knockoff time approaches and deadlines are not met, to the telephone addict who talks and talks and all the while absentmindedly rolls little balls of sticky tape and delivers them to every corner of the room with the flick of his thumb, and later complains that someone is stealing his sticky tape!
I suppose I should be glad that this uninspired life is not mine alone, but the knowledge only serves to make me more miserable. If there is no hope for the well travelled and socially stimulated, then what hope is there for me, in my humble and dreary life? Oh, Rajeed! Come and rescue me! Carry me off into the night on a glistening black stallion, with your saffron robes flowing in the wind.
Night! Already? Where did the day go? All that drudgery can’t have passed so quickly! Nothing in this day has been exciting enough to hasten the hours! It must have been all that daydreaming... lingering in memories of cinnamon and sandalwood. I wonder what the girl staring out the window dreams about, or the boat builder, while he sips his tea? Maybe he dreams of sailing off into the sunset in a boat with red sails and no real destination in mind, just following the trade winds to the four corners of the globe. Oh well, I guess I’ll just watch a little bit of telly and then go to bed. Nothing else to do! No one to dance with to the sounds of the sitar! No candle light to sparkle and play on golden thighs! No black stallion on which to ride off into the night! Maybe I’ll just go and make myself a late supper snack!
DARN! I must have eaten the last cinnamon roll last night. Oh, well, I’ll just have to settle for the English muffin... Didn’t I have a can of whipped cream in the fridge?