In my loneliness I imagine the beast is an illusion. That my paddlewheel, my bulkheads, my transom, are blessed and divine. My ornamentation and filligree carvings are only flaking from a forgotten time and not mouldering anew with each disappearance. That the inumerable parallel scratches crisscrossing the varnish of my decks are signatures of ecstacy. But I am not of the pure and these marks, their name is terror.
Last winter’s couple were beautiful. She on the step to the upper deck waiting with her chin dipped, her thighs revealed as he pushed back the hem. His fingertips tracing her small clothes and the turn of his wrist pulling aside the fabric. When she laughed at her lover, and told him how it tickled, my eaves and lintels and roof–walk swooned at their caressing, their intimacy, their secrets upon my timeless floors.
He played a ukulele and she danced without shoes. They lay at the bows above my plimsol line and whispered to the wavering moon. She pulled peaches and a knife and a bottle from her hessian bag. He turned over and she fed him wine and speared the peach slices from his naked belly and they laughed together. Then she placed her bangles inside her bag and tugged at his clothes and her mouth opened to teeth perfect in their rows. She climbed onto him and he pulled over her head her summer dress and gazed at her breasts. She looked down without speaking and his eyes caught the moonlight and upon my deck they began gently to rock.
I cradle them with my teak floors, my windows, my door frames. Through ribbon windows long emptied of glass, I offer them a weave of stars. I release the perfumes from my timbers and open the doors to soften the shadows of my narrow corridors. I encourage their every caress and rapture. I close doors to give the lovers together peaceful and intimate knowing of each other. But I fail to prevent what their movements have stirred and the untwining tentacles growing out of the lagoon and round my hull like a montrous forest. I am mute to alarm when that nightmare slithers silently into their chosen room seeking out salted human flesh. Nor do I alert my lovers feeling the touch not from each other, but from it.
She twists sideways, her mouth upon his, then torn away as she screams. He feels his naked flesh crawling with the sting of each eager sucker and clings her to him. Then he too twists, his face and neck swaddled in glistening obsidian muscle. His body is wrenched from hers and they are dragged apart across my decks ripping fingernails along the floor and clutching my gunwhales then tumbling backwards into the water round me. Gone beneath the languid surface with a few bubbles, and some moon coloured foam.
The rocking of my hull slows and the wavelets lap through the mangrove roots to the shore and this river boat is once more silent. We wait for two more of you to come and walk my planks. For otherwise surely you would not come, and I would remain alone with it.
end
