the aviation museum

The affair started in the aviation museum, an eco-build of wood and glass that was conspicuously modern among the hopeless countryside. The building smelt new, its organic paintwork barely dried on its sanitized surfaces, its virginal wooden beaming untainted by age, as fresh as the renewable forests they were sourced from, its solar panels defective, unwired, like black bruises over the roof of the museum. It was a place of wasted efforts, of high-grade morals swamped to drowning in the practicality of their execution. An idea failed, I thought sadly. No one realised the irony of an ecologically constructed aviation museum, a celebration of all things flight conjoined with architectural conservational programmes. Dazzled by bomber engines and cramped cockpits, carbon footprints were quickly replaced by a celebratory awe at the ingenuity of humankind, the awful posturing of the buildings marketable green essence lost to historical testimony and grainy projections, mannequins in bomber jackets and tender personal reminiscences all edited for ignorance into emotive phrasing then plasticized into lifelong signage and scaled up to a 72 font.

It probably started before the aviation museum, but it was there we first fucked, pressed up against a replica Lancaster bomber, her heavy face damp with exhilaration, cheeks flat down along the fibreglass shell of the make-believe aircraft. I was only strong enough to hold one of her legs up around my waist and I had to bend my knees to fuck her, while her other stiletto heel ground a pockmark into the newly laid flooring. We just pushed her underwear to one side, but in the aviation context the whole thing felt weirdly romantic.

We’d come as a date. We were both married but she was ten years older than me.

*

A couple of weeks before that we’d been at a bar as part of a group outing. It was late and snowing and we were sitting outside, our partners chatting over continental lager inside, as though we had arranged something illicit beforehand. Her black hair shone bright in the snow, in the reds, yellows and blues of the coloured light bulbs that lit the marquee. I felt sad towards the future and there was ice on the wooden picnic tables. I felt it on the backs of my thighs, so cold it felt hot, crystallizing the curves of her denim legs. We sat close together, our legs touching at the top, our arms almost linked, and my eyes stung with drink to her spoken eulogies that rolled forth from between the slightly stained teeth that I wished against my own. She laughed like it was all incredibly serious, and I imagined her husband away, and I imagined us at it, me and her, our deft hands freezing at the ends of our hot bodies in the December snow. It was like the end of an era that never started. She asked me what she would do without me, but was drunk and smiled as she said it. Her thighs, I thought, and I thought of pulling them open and apart, stripping away her age into something like me, her lived eyes dark, her fingers learned. We would kiss with our eyes open; we would talk with them closed. I said I didn’t know, with half an erection, didn’t know what she would do. I could have kissed her then but we stood up together and went back inside.

*

In the aviation museum we walked next to each other, but had a gap of about a foot between our shoulders. We enjoyed the informational signs in determined silence, appreciated the engines and the fuselages as though our genitals depended on them. I glanced in cockpits and pointed at the vintage, oiled dials and panels of the instrument binnacles, she thought about the human impact of new jet developments. As we walked beneath a wooden carved Spitfire I looked towards her; she looked slightly nervous, despite her condescending eyebrows. I rested my fingers on her shoulder. She finished sending a message, and her lips looked wet because of the natural light reflecting on the lip-gloss.

*

We stopped seeing each other soon after. It wasn’t that we stopped liking each other, it just somehow didn’t seem appropriate any more, like we didn’t want to have to judge our time in the aviation museum by other, future times. I still think about the way she felt around me and her loud voice. If I didn’t know her I would definitely do it again.

*

Up against the Lancaster I sank into her cunt, ten years older than me! Her massive rings stopped her clutching my forearms, the one buttock I held felt thick like sirloin between my merciful fingertips, thighs aching with bent knees I drove it home into her, her chin supported on my shoulder like an injured sportsman, the aviation museum at closing time without another visitor to see it. When we’d finished we left the museum without a contribution and walked back to the bus stop. I could hear the human hiss of the sea from the other side of the concrete defences across the road. The ice was melting. I saw her onto the bus and we didn’t say goodbye. For a second I watched it pull away, the exhaust fumes like insulation in the cold, and I remembered her tan skin, and held onto it, the bus lights blurring on the darkening coast road.