Dada 21

Time passed and my mood got better. Sunday drifted into night. We laughed and smoked and sang to the moon and early stars. Shabela came down and we got out the pipe and smoked at the edge of the sand till the darkness came down like a curtain over the beach. We looked at the moon and stars on the water. They calmed me but I suddenly I seemed to be slung between the notes of the harmonica and as restless as the waves on last night’s crumpled sheets. Something of both rose and fell inside me. We said goodbye to Shabela and his wife. She told Iskra that she would bring the woman in blue again.

‘She says more than her prayers but she is a good friend.’ She said.

‘She knows you’ I nodded.

‘Does she like you’ she asked. I said nothing.

‘You must bring these brave boys again’ She said. ’ We don’t get as many as interesting as you around here’

Iskra  laughed. We paid Shabela .  Iskra laughed again. Shabela’s wife swam in and out of my vision as she waved.

The rocks were as light as the silver paper they came wrapped in; safe as lightning in my pocket. Shabela waved us goodbye beneath the moon. Iskra seemed happy. He sang as we drove all the way back to the city. We took a ride around the waterfront bars and decided where to return to later. A café’ here, a soft drink there in the brown bars where the women from Burma lay down in the back rooms all added to our mood. We burned the Crystal in a big bar with a karaoke room full of music and love flowing from every one of its aisles. The smell of jasmine where it had once been smoke rolled in on the breeze from Kalimantan and we sucked in deep. I should have felt good but instead I felt hot and cold at the same time in sudden uncertain spasms that had afflicted me since morning.