I was sitting in a deckchair, taking the last rays of the evening, they’re the best
ones, coming in under the ozone layer at the end of the day, cutting out all the
blue, coming on strong red and orange, best suntan in the least time. Not like
the idiots out there on the beach every day, microwaving their holiday skins to
a frazzle, gone in a trouser month back home.
The sweat was running down my horizontal form in tiny rivulets of salt and
alcohol, getting out the toxins of another afternoon’s over-indulgence.
Sometimes the sweat just built up in a layer, in between the belly folds and
chest hairs, before it suddenly dropletted into a mini sweatfall through the
canyons of my skin.
Sometimes, it came running down past my eyes from my hands, held above
my sweaty head, evening up the tan on my armpits and belly, dripping and
dropping through my eyebrows and lashes, stinging my eyes, tickling my
cheeks and lips, caught in my beard and dripping on, into the hairs, flats and folds below.
Armpit tan is a tribal tattoo, marking your shamanic status, you’re from here, not from there, you are as one with the sun god and he has illuminated your entire person, and now he’s tickling out more drips and drops that run down my sides and darken the seat fabric under my sticky back and bum cleft.
It’s important to always take in plenty of fluids in these situations, and my fluid intake at that moment was beyond reproach, in volume, and in alcohol by volume, mostly alcohol. In volume.
Actually, there are lots of ways to start sweating that don’t involve hot sun or excessive alcohol intake, but can open those pores and wring you out, whether that was what you wanted. Or not.
Exercise, for instance, is a great way of getting those glands working, working to the bone. To the bone, bone, bone. One. Two. Three. Four. You can always count on exercise to get the rivers running. The stains show as the rivers flow, vertically glanding drops and drips until the salty rivers run. Stinking your thighs and stinging your eyes.
Embarrassment. Red-faced, sun-hot, uncontrollable, unwanted, unloved, unexpected eruption, boiling, bubbling, bursting from every tiny volcanic follicle. Brow, bottom, brain, an internal, infernal inferno exploding heat to every face and arse cheek, armpit, sense and sensitivity. The fountains fountain, and the floes flow…
Guilt. Let’s face it, we’ve all been bad at some point, made a bad decision, done something stupid, nasty, something we regret. Makes you wonder sometimes. Regrets, I’ve had a few, but then again, who hasn’t? Wrong place. Wrong time. Guilt is a blowtorch, red-necking, skin-scorching, cheek-clenching, wringing your wrongs as the trickles trickle. A thing forgotten. A molten past.
Beyond sweat-sealed eyes and shades squeezes dark light then light dark. Cloud. Shade. Bright white light. Under the hot sun, under my armpits, under my skin, the drops were dripping, impurities had been purified, under the bubbling sky, under my stretched skin and under the broiling volcano, I was cool, I was hot.
That early evening sun was still doing its thing, squeezing out all my nastiness, non-fake-tanning my underarms and chins, and in the background of it all, there was a momentary sense of an approaching, an arrival, a change of tuning, a ripple of breeze fluffing my armpit hair, bustling the leaves of all the plants, blowing cigarette smoke across hot tiles. And for a few seconds, all my hairs stood up erect and attentive on end on the end of their bumped geese.
Fear is not a thing that makes you sweat. Fear can be cold, dark. Fear can be deep or shallow, fear can be everything and fear can be nothing. A distant sound. A cry in the dark. A knife held close to your throat. The deafening silence inside your head, a thing imagined. Nothing at all. Scariest of all, it’s hard to tell sometimes, which is deepest, which is darkest, which is the real fear, and which is just the fear of the fear. The fairground ride, the masked assassin.
Fearlessness is staying cool in any situation, in control, of the moment, of the past, of the unknowable, ice cool, clear as ice, everything crystal clear. When you could be drowning your fearful death underneath it.
The cold eye of the killer, cold steel, cold comfort and the cold stabbing pain of the cold shoulder. The chilling second when life catches up. An ice axe between the eyes. A moment of truth. Frozen in time. Forever.
A drip dropped, stinging my eye, and one sticky hand slipped from the other, jilting me joltingly to the fact that a bell was ringing. Drip, drop. Ding, dong.
The sun had dropped, behind the roofs, the evening clouds, the rocks and the rustling leaves, the rivers ran dry, a bell was still ringing. Ringing. Wringing.
Peeling my head from under a hot hand and my mind from where it had wandered, peeling sun-glassed eyes open, peeling my strong sticky back from horizontal, the pealing pealed on. Dong ding. Peeling light from dark, peeling truth from fiction, achieving virtual verticality, swerving from white light to the ringing, singing song sounding darkly from beyond the staircase, drink, drunk, smoke but no fire, wringing, ringing, flip, flop, swaggering, staggering. Who’s pulling the rope? The. Bell. Told.
I wasn’t listening. I didn’t hear. I wasn’t there, I wasn’t thinking, I wasn’t paying attention, I wasn’t expecting the unexpected, why should I? It wasn’t me. I didn’t do it.
It wasn’t the light, it wasn’t the dark, the heat, the cool, it wasn’t the time and it wasn’t the place, it wasn’t me who opened the door, it wasn’t locked. But as it swung open and my salted sockets bleared at the coffin-cold familiarity of the white-faced bell toller, there wasn’t a drop of sweat to be found anywhere on me.
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