DOCKERS
I smack the dust mark on my shoulder bag, razor with my thumbnail, lick my forefinger
and dab. The khaki stain tans back out of the canvas as the spit dries.
Dawn flights have begun to arrive off the European hub and the transit lounge is filling up with men in suits, families with plastic bags and boxes of electrical goods. Through the glass wall behind my bucket seat the Departure Hall, a floor below, first light picks out a blonde half my age. I'm old enough to know the deception of travel tiredness and sun on hair, but she is lovely sitting at a table sipping coffee, tapping her mobile phone slowly round end on end like she got the news she wanted and is looking forward to it. I pull my eyes away the second before she looks up. My flight is called.
*
It is not an erection, but as the plane banks to approach along the river my penis hardens hot along my leg. This has begun to happen lately at the end of journeys in jeeps, trains, and now for the first time on a plane - a kind of wanting to be out of my shoes.
The cabin crew strap themselves into the row facing me, back along the fuselage. Below, undercarriage thunks and chunks into place, I stretch out my arms and miss a seat in front to push against, someone to reassure the clunks don't mean the plane is about to crash, just getting ready to land.
*
Pissed off by the people clustered round the carousel as if their bags were stuffed with long lost relatives short of air, I pick a spot well back - as far off as the walk from when the cases loll through the tapes in the conveyor's mouth, to the curve where they turn and become the luggage that round and rounds when all the passengers have gone. To pass the time I try to spot the cameras of the Excise people and make furtive body language, looking everywhere, nowhere, touching my face as if to cover it.
When they search me I stand starfish, dangerous, indignant, offended at my splayed case on the bench. They take the figurine away as they often do: a fine example, twelve inches high, carved deeper nose to nape than ear to ear, maybe her smooth white rock says snow, crack, cocaine. After whatever it is they do - weighing or x-ray - I rewrap her in tissue paper while they prod my packing back.
Coming out into arrivals I'm guilty I sent the postcard. Nessie's long black coat buttoned at the neck, her hand at her throat, she tip-toes her laced leather ankle boots to kiss me and saying, "It's O.K. isn't it?" I hug her shoulders. In the taxi she lies, "I was at a loose end, so I thought I'd come and meet you." Which was what I had wanted then, when I wrote, in the hot afternoon.
*
I'm what the sale details called self-contained - lying in bed I can watch the sun rise through the legs of my breakfast table for a couple of hours before the suits arrive in the office block opposite, and become a wall of white-shirts bending over their screens. There's another couple of sun hours in the evening as it slips between the knee of a blue lit office slab and the white pylons of the river bridge. Night is blaze, flood-lit for cleaning and the few white-shirts who work all through, but most is waste, empty, scared of the dark.
The taxi drops us and we go straight to eat in a cold concrete box bar-restaurant on the corner of my block, dull aluminium, pale orange and lime green. Nessie fills me in, nesting reports on everyone we know, the settling, their plumping into adults.
In the lift we're silent, I let us in, drop my bags and we stand in the flat zebra striped with shadows from the office glare. In a black and white film this would be moonlight, and already I'm saying, "You can either sleep...." Knowing Nessie will interrupt, "Where do you think I'm sleeping?"
*
The sun warms Nessie, curled hands resting the duvet to her stomach, wearing just my shirt open and curled in on itself. A button chafes her nipple so as she wakes she is ready-roused to turn, hitch herself over, resume bruising my lips 'til it ends the way it ended last night, only a couple of hours ago, tracing my finger down her spine, between, dipping wetness and Nessie props herself up, lays a finger on my teeth.
"No."
THE FULL STORY IS AVAILABLE IN ROUTE COMPENDIUM