TEN SECONDS TO LIFT OFF
Mistral, Sirocco and Simoom were three of a kind, lately unsure of their proclivities to other genders, yet certain about their need for love. At first, they tried living together menage à trois style, then – after several arguments concerning clothes-pegs – they resided in conjoined granny flats manufactured from old army billets, brought to one site like portakabins; and now, more recently, bivouacked betweeen the two Plateaux of Jullipbar where the serendipities of wind and breeze held sway.
Indeed, the three of them today flourished and had their being amid the gusts of life that thrived at the interface of two separate and quite different configuations of Jullipbar geography, although both these flattened-out swirls of contour and geomancy were each called by the single name Plateau … in the way that ordnance mapmakers talked those days about their terrestrial discipline of direction and status quo. Indeed, the esoteric art of cartography was easier, and the diagrammatic drawings relatively simple when the various terminologies of landname were kept to the minimum.
The very essence and personality of Mistral, Simoom and Sirocco – as well as their physique – were determined by the nature of the movement in the air they breathed and floated upon or, during their more human moments, walked through like stately society duchesses in a novel by Marcel Proust. The valley betwn the two Plateaux (one Plateau hot and salty, the other Plateau cold, wet and sandy) was where they sported their social graces, sometimes six feet above the ground like tea-cutter balloons, at other times rooted firmly in the ground like cos lettuces, and, yet, rarely, but certainly on occasions, striding along dressed in the expensive frills, embroidered fabrics and lace-trimmed veils of late 19th century France – albeit such finery was really sail-cloth disguised as high fashion.
One cold, yet intermittently hot, day in March, the endemic winds were literally damped into a neutral gear by the sodden down-draughts of air that could hardly be called wind at all. Mistral was preening herself, ready to speak out against the other two, of whom she was jealous: mainly because they were canoodling amid the fast stagnating atmosphere. The other two stared back at Mistral with scorn, as she was still able to float above the ground, whilst they, Sirocco and Simoom, felt their feet planting themselves like a late crop for mere peasants to reap. They were all on their way, as it happened, to their triangular bivouac near the cusp of the Pan-handle of Jullipbar … where further canoodling was promised, if they could but reach such privacy, away from any damp swirls of disease and dead lung that threatened to prevail in Jullipbar. Whatever the case, Mistral simply knew, in her frantic whirlwinds of heartache, that she was due to be ostracised. She was not flavour of the month. And whilst two’s company, three is definitely a cloud. She simply knew.
Smiling, and pulling her puff-tweed petticoats to knee-length, with the result of an exciting glimpse of her nicely turned ankle, Mistral strode on towards the welcome arms of the bivouac where she would pleasure herself for a while, to the sounds of regathering breezes threatening to turn the tornado of her emotions from taken-as-red to go-go-go-go-green.
Whilst two’s company, one’s certainly never far away from a perfect paradise of equilibrium and meditation, amid the purring perfumed wafts of balm and peace that managed to thread the portakabin’s costly Venetian blinds.
The crazy geographers looked on at Mistral – with the pungent contours of age wrinkling their strange, yet quirkily pleasant faces, their watchful expressions out-racing the very landscape by more than a head and a mere nose.
Sirocco and Simoom, back on the Pan-handle, became entwined like runner has-beens. Ten seconds to lift off.
(unpublished)
