Convalescence

Father Ignatius

(MF voy<*>)

© September 2000

There are many complaints to be made about flying tourist-class; the un-food-like nature of the so-called food, the shortage of leg-room, the superabundance of crying babies, the occasional tantalising peeks into First Class revealing that, in addition to getting leg-room and real food on real plates, they even get the prettiest stewardesses. The bitch-list includes “not enough room to screw”. Or privacy, you may add, thinking—and rightly—about the shameful way that children and little old ladies insist on hogging their fair share, and more, of the limited toilet facilities available on an aeroplane. This happens not to be a problem for Carol, however.

I first met Carol when I was recuperating from the medical effects of trying to run refugee camps in Uganda. These were set up in great haste to cater, with woeful inadequacy, for the flood of Rwandan refugees. The most immediate emergency is always the exhausted people without food or shelter who roam the countryside. When the tents and field kitchens arrive these people can be housed and fed, after a fashion, and the transient population becomes static. This, coupled with the inevitable overloading, leads to the emergence of the traditional enemies: typhoid, dysentery and cholera. Nowadays, on top of all else, we also have a high incidence of AIDS in the general population and, every so often, a new disease, such as Ebola virus or Congo fever, emerges. The breaking news is rumours of the re-emergence of smallpox. All in all, there’s never a dull moment.

When I eventually collapsed with some interesting tropical disease, the Red Cross, guided by my next-of-kin records, flew me out to South Africa. This led to a long convalescence in the tiny town where my father lives amongst a community of other retired people. I was very weak for a long, long time and my step-mother took delight in feeding me up. They have a very active social life with a large circle of friends. I was inspanned to assisting them to host a brisk series of braais. Being caught alone on the receiving end of the generation gap, I was expected to be barman and cook while the wrinklies lizarded around in the sun. They would watch me scurrying around trying to keep up with their intake, offering helpful remarks.

I was a tremendous audience for all their stories that they’d already told each other time without number. One of my dad’s friends was a retired sailor who’d captained the giant tug John Ross that patrols the stormy Cape coast and I became fully conversant with his youthful exploits shipping tanks to Murmansk and so forth. Several of them, like my dad, are retired university lecturers. One is a retired linguist of African languages whose research interest was the establishment of technical neologisms in non-technical African languages; if you ever want to know what the Xhosa for carburettor is, he’s your man. The other one was an optical physicist who pioneered the South African Large Telescope project.

All this went on to the point where I was well-fed, relaxed, healthy and, after a long hiatus, bored and ready for mischief. Not to put to fine a point on it, I was becoming as randy as a stoat with no-one under the age of sixty-five to assist me with this last stage of my convalescence.

As we were setting out tables and chairs in the garden for yet another braai the telephone rang and Joan, my step-mother, came out to report that Doris had asked if she might bring her grand-daughter. Said grand-daughter, Doris had confided, had been sent to stay with her to get over a traumatic break-up with her long-term boyfriend. The grand-daughter was, of course, included in the usual generous hospitality.

Most of the guests had arrived by the time Doris and her grand-daughter appeared and I was being run off my feet, as usual, with barman duty. Carol was younger than I’d expected for a refugee from a long-term relationship—about eighteen, I guessed. She had short, red hair and a pale, freckled complexion that looked ready to explode into lobster-orange given enough of the harsh, African sun. She was a little pudgy—the last signs of puppy-fat were still there—with broad hips and a very nice, very round bottom encased snugly in blue jeans. When she forgot to slouch, she revealed good shoulders and nice, round breasts firmly clasped in a sports bra that showed through her thin, much-laundered, white cotton button-up shirt. She was still young enough to be embarrassed by being seen in public with Granny and slouched along resentfully, dragging her sandals in a pathetic show of defiance. She was also looking a bit browbeaten. No-one knew who Doris would be at all surprised by that.

“Hullo again, young man,” said Doris, cheerful as usual, “How the hell are you?”

“I’m fine, thanks, Doris, and how the hell are you?”

“Parched like a donga in a drought and dying for a gwaai,” said Doris firmly, “Carol, lovey, get Granny a G&T, there’s a good girl.”

Hallelujah! A fellow member of the Younger Generation to wait hand and foot. Maybe I’d get time to sit down and have a drink myself for a change.

Doris lost interest in us as, in a single practised movement, she plumped into a chair while lighting up the first gwaai of the afternoon and starting a conversation with Joan. There was a bar-sized ash-tray placed ready by her chair. Long before she went home, it would overflow with stompies and it would be my duty, or Carol’s, to empty it.

Left to our own devices, Carol and I looked warily at each other.

“Hi, I’m Henri,” I said, offering to shake her hand, “Can I get you a drink?”

“’Tsokay,” she mumbled resentfully, “Where are the mixings?”

I took her into the kitchen where we each opened a can of Castle. I’d just started saying something moronic about, “So, you’re Doris’s grand-daughter? Are you going to be staying long?” when Doris’s gravelly roar of outrage floated in from the garden.

“Oi! Carol! Where’s my bleddy drink?”

Carol scarcely had time to start rolling her eyes in a martyred fashion before my father, terminally embarrassed at the failure of his hospitality, shot through the door.

“What’s going wrong? People dying of thirst out there!”

“I’m doing it,” snapped Carol, irritably. Oops. He backed out hurriedly. I watched Carol mixing Doris’s G&T, just so. She must have been properly trained, even as I had been by my father before I ever met her, on exactly how Doris likes her G&Ts.

“Thanks, lovey,” said Doris, sinking most of it in one pull. “God, that took time. Were you coming on to my grand-daughter in the kitchen, young man?” She crowed with dirty laughter and the rest of the wrinklies joined in while I smiled in the way you smile when you’re embarrassed and trying to be cool with it. Carol just stared at the ground and glowered.

“Well, Joan, seems you’ve fed him up back to health and strength, all right, eh?” Doris nudged Joan and there was another round of dirty laughter. Doris emptied her glass with a second pull and handed it to Carol. “That was a good start; get Granny another, there’s a good girl.”

I started forward, knowing that I was expected to do these things.

“No, pellie, you stay here,” said Doris. “I don’t want to die of thirst out here while you two young things canoodle in the kitchen. Look out, young man, your boerewors is burning.”

Annoyingly, she was right. I shot back to the braai to turn the boerewors and lamb chops and damp down the fire while Carol scuttled off to the kitchen with Doris’s empty glass.

“Honestagawd, kids these days. Hanging around like a bunch of spivs with nothing to do except look for trouble,” said Doris forthrightly. My father nodded in commiseration. “Are you going to make that salad or aren’t you?” he said to me as Carol reappeared on the trot and presented Doris with her replenished G&T.

“Just off. Watch the fire for me,” I said,

“Go and help the young man, Carol” said Doris, “Shown him what you’ve got.”

To the sound of another round of knowing laughter, Carol and I beat it into the kitchen to make the salad and get to know each other, not necessarily in that order. Away from Doris, she was a relaxed, fun person and we bickered happily about how to make a truly excellent salad and, before long, she was putting an arm into the small of my back to hold me steady while sucking salad dressing from my fingers so I could smooth the hair back from her brow because her fingers were oily, too, and she was giggling as, in making a hasty taste-test, she accidentally dropped a half-slice of cucumber onto her breast and I then had to suck that clean, too, and I was discovering what it feels like to have salad dressing in your hair while someone holds your head into her breast and gives you some insight into why a long-term boyfriend might have dumped such a delightful, fun creature.

For Carol likes to have sex where there’s a danger of getting caught. For example, in my dad’s kitchen while he’s got guests. Or, if you’ve tried and failed to get a fully-aroused but panic-stricken Henri to do that, in his bedroom with the picture window facing onto the garden where the wrinklies are chatting and supervising the braai, behind a lace curtain that flutters in the breeze.

I stumbled down the passage after her as she backed in front of me, unbuttoning the waist-band of my jeans, pulling down the zip, pulling the jeans down, yanking at my underpants, while I struggled to unbutton her shirt.

“Not here,” I said, as we staggered into my bedroom and I saw the wrinklie brigade beyond the lace curtain.

“Yes, here,” she said firmly, shrugging her shirt off her shoulders and letting it slide down to her elbows. I capitulated and nuzzled into her breasts while feeling for the front hook of the sports bra. She undid her own jeans and pushed me aside as she briskly thrust them, tangled with her panties, down to her calves. Her shirt was still bunched round her elbows as she took my waist firmly in hands and fell back onto the bed, carrying me with her. In less time that it takes to tell, she had engineered me, bursting with lust, onto her, between her spread knees, as she lay hobbled by her clothing, helpless to resist. Not that she wanted to.

Sobbing with the recollection of how many weeks I’d gone without sex, I plunged eagerly into her and was as eagerly received. I thrust and pounded at her, inelegant and thoughtless, like an over-eager schoolboy who’s blown all his pocket money savings on his first whore and she responded in kind as the pressure quickly built into a massive, hot, sticky series of merciful releases that went on and on and on.

When I finally rolled off her onto my back, we lay shoulder to shoulder, getting our breath back. “Wow,” she said, rolling over to examine the semen dribbling down her legs and onto the bedspread.

“Sorry, I was ’way overdue,” I said.

“Tell me about it, young man.” She was mimicking Doris, “Henri, was it?”

“Yes, Henri,”

“Okay, Henri, let’s get that salad out there before they come looking for it.”

“So, young man,” said Doris as I served her salad and boerewors and lamb chops, “been getting on all right, have you?”

“Yes, Doris. Just fine.”

Next day we fucked in the Klerksdorp Museum. Doris heard they needed some strong backs to get a new exhibit—an old trek wagon, designed for twenty-six span of oxen to drag through the veldt—properly mounted and serenely volunteered on my behalf. She sent Carol to get me. After it was all over, the helpers dispersed and the museum settled back into its customary deserted state and we took a look round. It’s a very unusual museum, being in the old town prison-house. The rows of cells, with the original heavy steel doors still fitted, each house a different exhibit. You step through the door into the cell and, a few feet inside, there’s a wall of glass. You stand in the gloom inside the door and, beyond the glass, there’s an exhibit, spot-lit from above the exhibit. The most memorable exhibit, complete with freaky dummies, is a reconstruction of what the cell looked like after Saturday night when the building was still a prison. A door or two down, there’s a reconstruction of what a Boer bedroom looked like back in the earlies, with peach-pip studded floors and toys made out of sheeps’ vertebrae. And a double bed.

Carol hadn’t shown much interest in the museum, taking advantage of the gloom to cup my butt and feel me up generally. When she saw the bed, she slid her palm down my belly, inside my jeans and, wrapping her fingers around my eager cock, murmured, “I wonder how they get in there to clean?” The short answer is through a series of doors, one to the outside and linking each cell to the next. We found the outside door and sneaked from cell to cell through the exhibits until we got to the bedroom.

Behind the glass, you could scarcely see out. The light inside reflected off the glass wall and made a crude mirror. It was almost impossible to see through the glass. Not that we were looking. We were pulling each other’s clothes off and rolling onto the bed. I was kneeling, naked, between her legs and about to dip my head into her crotch when she said, “No, wait. First tie my hands.”

Um. What?

“Tie my hands,” she said, “I can’t get off otherwise.”

Short of tearing strips off the antique curtains I didn’t know what to do until I thought of my bootlaces. I stripped my boots of them in clumsy, randy haste and realised that the flat headboard offered no convenient tethering points. The old Boers were obviously not into bondage; they presumably wanted their wives free to brew coffee or herd the cows at a moments notice. Frantic to bury my cock into Carol’s dripping, beckoning cunt, I had the inspiration of tethering her wrists to her ankles, with clumsy, rushing fingers, trying to remember how not to tie a granny-knot.

“Yes, yes, come on,” said Carol through gritted teeth as I finished the last knot, “Quick, do it.”

I needed no further encouragement and buried my face in her dripping crotch, burrowing and licking as she twisted and writhed and begged for release. When I couldn’t hold back any more I took her shoulders and leaned my weight on them, pressing her back into the pillows, as I thrust gently forward, slowly introducing my cock into her cunt, millimetre by millimetre as she begged me to come on, come on, do it, do it.

At this point I became aware of the sound of adolescent sniggering. Squinting, horrified, through the glass, I became aware that a party of high-school students had arrived on a museum field trip. There was no doubt about it; we were the highlight of the tour. I could here excited young voices calling down the corridor, “Frikkie, kom kyk. Kom kyk!” No teacher worth her salt is oblivious to such suspicious interest in the educational process and, as I watched, from between Carol’s knees, I dimly saw a skirted adult appear beyond the glass in the cell doorway. My cock shrivelled guiltily while the still oblivious Carol strained against my bootlaces and thrust her pelvis beggingly forward at me.

She was soon brought up-to-speed in no uncertain style; the kids were reluctantly herded from the cell and the door, left standing open for years, was forced creakingly shut by the indignant teacher as the museum’s senile security guards blundered around trying to figure out how to get at us. I tore desperately at my hastily-tied knots as the sounds of pursuit approached, finally freeing Carol’s wrists while leaving the laces flapping from her ankles. We grabbed our clothes and sneaked into the next exhibit, towards the approaching guards. It is an exhibit, entitled (you should excuse my French) “Jaculation”, of Bushman hunting techniques with spear and bow—they manage to achieve marvellous accuracy hunting wildcats, red-tailed foxes and other such innocent-bystander organisms.

We hid behind a board with a diagram of spear and arrow trajectories that, in other circumstances, might have proved most interesting. Right now, it merely proved most useful as as shield while the guards blundered past to the bedroom exhibit. Being barefoot, we were able to tip-toe quietly back through the various exhibits through the door into the open air, sneak back into the corridor and, clothes in hand, run nakedly for the cloakroom with not more than twenty or thirty wildly excited teenagers screaming “Kyk daar, mevrou!” and giving pursuit. At one point, Carol trod on the lace bound round the other foot and nearly sprawled, dropping her clothes. I caught her and dragged her on, abandoning the clothes to the pursuers.

Fortunately, the cloakroom was empty. I hastily barricaded the door with the attendant’s chair. I was more embarrassed than I knew it was possible to be but Carol was giggling delightedly and, as I turned from jamming the chair under the door handle, she gave me a joyful, child-like hug-and-kiss. I tore myself free as the pounding on the door began.

“Get dressed, for Christ’s sake!” I begged her, dragging on my trousers. My boots had been left behind, I now discovered.

“In what?” she giggled. I gave her my shirt that, at least came on her to mid-thigh. As the door continued to resist our excited pursuers, we climbed out of the cloakroom window and squeezed painfully through the hedge into the car-park, our two half-nakednesses startling the postman who shouted out after our guiltily fleeing figures. Mercifully, the car keys were still in my trousers pocket. As the guards, the teacher and the kids erupted out of the door, I got the car going and, spinning wheels and shooting gravel back at them, we rocketed off.

The last thing I saw in the rear-view mirror as I hurtled for the nearest corner was Carol’s black silk boxers waving triumphantly in the fist of a happy, happy high-school boy who is forever going to think better of museums than he might otherwise have done.

It was then that I decided that my recuperation was over and Carol decided that she’d got over being dumped by her previous boyfriend.

We flew out to Johannesburg the next morning, tourist-class. Carol made a determined effort for us to carry on in the airport cloakroom where we left off in the museum cloakroom but I was spotted sneaking into the Ladies with her and only fast talking got us onto the flight. But at least this meant that I found out how to have sex in tourist class, without concealing blankets or using the toilets. But that is another story.

• The original version of this story was written in three hours as a Write Club duel with Aquillae. Hecate was the referee. Thanks, Aquillae; thanks, Hecate.

  The Challenge Words were:

  Aquillae	spiv logotechnician craspedomorphology
  Father Ignatius	museum car park cloakroom
  Hecate	seaman organism jaculation

  Special rules:

  1. No: paedo, rape, snuff, violence, or Rom;
  2. The story must contain:
     1. a scene in an airport,
     2. a postman,
     3. a pair of black silk boxers
     4. No previously-used characters

• Thank you for reading me.
• I would be pleased to hear from you, at FatherIgnatius@ANTISPAMananzi.co.za , about whether or not you liked this story, and why.