This Is All Read online

  Something else. I felt as I read that little poem again and again that the words were mine, that I had written them, that the poem belonged in some particular and exclusive way to me. This made me want to write more of my mopes. Gave me the confidence to do so. Showed me the way. Gave me a model, a pattern to work to – a recipe for a different kind of dish from any I had made before. Which I did during the next few weeks, one after another, pouring all my passion for William into them.

  They make me smile with embarrassment now, some of them. And naturally, they’re mostly pale copies of the ones they were based on. But so what! As my English teacher, Ms Martin, told me, you have to start somehow, and how better than by imitating the best poems you can find? That’s the way you learn how to write. They helped me at the time, and I’m glad to have my first embarrassing mopes because they remind me more vividly than anything else of what I was and how I felt then. Better than photos or old clothes or school reports or mementos or souvenirs, however evocative these may be. I like poetry so much because for me it resurrects life and remakes the world.

  *

  Let’s have a fermata, a pause for a change of air. Here’s a passage of the kind I was writing in my pillow book around the time I fell for Will. (I’ll give us changes of air like this when I feel we need them as my story progresses.)

  A-whoring

  I don’t go a-whoring. But I might. One day, I might. One night. For the fun of it. The excitement. The risk. The danger. Just to try it. Just to see what it’s like.

  But of course I won’t. Still. A-whoring. On the streets. At night. In the dark glow of back-street lights. On the corner. In a whore dress. Tight top. Short black-leather mini-skirt. Slinky broad-mesh black stockings. A wig of long blonde hair. Loads of make-up.

  I’ll drawl to passing men, ‘Looking for business?’

  They’ll ask, ‘How much? Have you somewhere to go?’

  To go a-whoring.

  Moonshine.

  Where do such fantasies come from, such desires, such temptations? Is there an instinct in us all, everybody, us girls anyway, to go a-whoring?

  And by whose lights a-whoring? Whose word a-whoring? A-hunting for a mate maybe. A vestigial urge of the virgin.

  Or like the girl, young woman actually, in Bangkok I saw on tv the other night. A man, an Australian journalist with a camcorder taking time out from his job, picked her up in a whore-bar, but didn’t want her for sex (so he said) but because he liked the look of her and wanted to be with her and talk to her.

  Of course he asked her why she went a-whoring, the way men do, as if they didn’t know and weren’t a-whoring themselves when they ask it. She said her family in the country was very poor and needed money to pay for their little house and bit of only-just-enough land to live on, so that house and land could not be taken from them by a greedy landlord. She had come to the city, never having been before, an innocent virgin, to earn the money her family needed, and whoring was the only work she could find.

  The Ozzy journalist befriended her, went with her to meet her family. And then said he would give her the money they needed (little enough by Ozzy-Western standards) if she would give up whoring and stay with her parents. She said she would. He gave her the money and went back to Oz.

  But he couldn’t get her out of his mind. Was haunted by her. Believed he was in love with her. So he returned a year later. But she wasn’t with her family. She had gone back to Bangkok. He searched till he found her. She was working in a worse whorehouse than before. And when he asked her why she had gone a-whoring again, having promised that she wouldn’t, she said, ‘Because it is my fate.’

  Is there such a thing as fate?

  I want to be unfated. I want to be an unfettered free spirit. But if fate means something inevitable, something required, something that you must do because you cannot escape it, then I know it is not my fate to go a-whoring, but it is my fate to put words on paper.

  Sausage fingers

  If I hadn’t fallen for Will I suppose I’d have got on with things – meaning sex – much faster. As it was, I became so anxious not to put him off by coming on too strong, and not to lose him by seeming too gauche and uncool, that I went into extreme fem mode and waited for him to make the next move. Which seemed like waiting for a rock to roll itself uphill.

  A week went by, eight days to be exact, before he bestirred himself, by which time I was in despair and also ready to chop him into little pieces. Then he sent an email.

  again? my place after school thursday? wb

  You could never accuse Will of loquacity.

  We cycled to his house, detached, just off the common, great view across the Golden Valley, very spick-and-span. No one in.

  Hopes fluttered. Please let him have more than music in mind.

  Coffee and bickies in bright and shiny all mod cons kitchen.

  Like to taste my lips? No such luck.

  Off to big L-shaped sitting room. Comfy slumpy furniture, flower pictures on walls, not my taste. Big-screen tv, expensive sound system, videos, CDs, no sign of books, view of tennis-court-sized walled back garden through floor-to-ceiling panoramic windows viewing rustic arbour twined with roses. Black Yamaha upright geared for silent playing if required in the ell of the L.

  Then an hour of trouble, for me anyway, with the second movement of the Schumann. Way beyond me when so distracted. My fingers were like sausages because of something he’d said in the kitchen.

  Like you do, I’d asked him what his father did.

  ‘He’s a boxer.’

  ‘A boxer?’

  Deadpan: ‘Yes. He puts people in boxes and buries them.’

  I still didn’t catch on. ‘What? He’s a boxer who buries people?’ Lordy, why am I so thick sometimes?

  ‘Yes. He’s an undertaker.’

  ‘An undertaker!’

  ‘A funeral director. A mortician. A disposer of the dead.’

  ‘Yes yes, thanks, I’ve got it,’ I said, edgy with my stupid self but sounding like I was edgy with him, and blushing, dammit, I know I was blushing. ‘Just surprised, that’s all. I mean—’ and only just stopped in time.

  ‘It’s okay, I know what you mean,’ he said, smiling with turned-down lips. ‘Dad owns Richmonds. Peter Richmond is my granddad, my mother’s father. Dad worked for him before he married Mum. Then he became a partner. Granddad’s retired now, so Dad runs the firm.’

  Not sure I wanted to know all that, but it covered my confusion while I readjusted my face. I couldn’t help imagining dead bodies lying about the house, waiting to be got rid of, and me stumbling over them if I went to the loo. Also that Will must somehow be, I dunno, infected, like death was a contagious disease (well it is pretty pandemic after all). And then I thought, Lordy! I’ve chosen a boy for sex who cohabits with dead bodies – well, not cohabits exactly, but lives with them anyway. All a bit of a facer, as Doris would say.

  ‘So,’ I said, off-hand as possible, ‘you’ll be joining your dad when you leave school? Keep the family business going.’

  He laughed like this was a big joke. But I was being dead (sorry!) serious. Wasn’t sure I wanted to be attached, however loosely, to a person in the boxing business.

  ‘No, not me,’ he said. ‘My brother’s plodding in the parental footsteps, thank god. I help out now and then when needed, but that’s all.’

  ‘Help out?’ Images montaged in my mind of Will doing rather-I-didn’t-know-about things with rather-I-didn’t-look-at dead bodies.

  ‘Underbear.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Carry coffins at funerals. Nothing nasty.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Easy extra cash. But I draw the line at anything more hands on.’

  I was relieved to hear it, and the mixed metaphor had the benefit of making me laugh, which he seemed to take as an encouraging sign.

  ‘Like to have a go?’ he said.

  ‘Eh?’ said I, thinking for one ghastly moment he meant underbearing.

  �
�The second movement.’

  ‘O! Yes, sure.’ And right then I was happier to play the piano than go for anything more carnal.

  Thus the reason my fingers turned to sausages.

  After about an hour that felt like a decade Will said, ‘Maybe you’re not up for it today?’

  Which didn’t exactly do much for my super-ego self-esteem. Do boys ever think before they say things like that?

  ‘Bit off form,’ I mumbled, feeling like going to the garden to eat worms.

  ‘How about Saturday afternoon for another try?’

  O, speak again, bright angel!

  ‘Sure,’ said I, and added too quickly dammit, ‘Doris won’t mind if we use her place and she’ll be away, I expect.’ (If she wasn’t I’d make sure she was going to be, not that in the event she put up any objection, being the understanding godsend she is. ‘If at first you don’t succeed,’ she said.)

  He laughed – well he would, wouldn’t he – and said, ‘Sounds good.’

  ‘It might,’ said I, holding my hands up and attempting a joke – o fatal fool! – ‘if I can manage to exchange these for fingers.’

  At which he had the good manners to laugh again. ‘In recovery already,’ he said.

  And just then, when I was thinking we might even get as far as a goodbye kiss if nothing more, Mrs Blacklin arrived home. A bossy-boots, if ever I saw one. Not my lucky day at all.

  The usual introductions.

  ‘Stay to dinner,’ she said or rather ordered. ‘We’re having stew.’

  ‘Very kind,’ said I, no hesitation, ‘but I’m expected home, sorry.’

  And I pedalled off, Will watching from the gate, which made me do a silly wobble when I turned round to see if he was still there and when I saw he was made me hyper aware of my feet, which felt as big as surfboards, and of my bum switching about on the saddle, which felt like an elephant’s perched on a pinhead.

  O god, he is so gorgeous, dammim.

  Question: Why doesn’t a desirable like him have a regular girl?

  Answer: Because of his funereal background?

  Question: Does it put me off?

  Answer: Not on your nelly, it doesn’t, ducky!

  As Father says, Experience is the best laboratory. No trying, no knowing.

  Or as Oscar Wilde put it, Experience is the name we give to our mistakes.

  No no, Oscar, darl: Experience is the name of the whole darn game.

  O, give me the experience I crave, Will B.

  Then what will be will be Will B.

  Idle activities that give me pleasure

  There’s a summerhouse at the bottom of our garden. We call it a summerhouse, but it’s really nothing more impressive than a large wooden hut with windows and some cane furniture. The front opens so that it can be turned into a kind of arbour. It gives me pleasure to sit there and do nothing, especially when the weather’s warm enough to open the front, because I like the feeling of being inside and outside at the same time. The lazy feeling that I’m doing something by doing nothing gives me pleasure.

  Also in our garden I have one of those small trampolines that are hardly bigger than a bass drum. It relaxes me and gives me pleasure when I’m tense to jump up and down on it in all weathers, even in the rain. I like to bounce on it with nothing on except a loose short thin dress so that I can feel the air all over my body, and especially between my legs. Even on a cold winter day this is exciting and refreshing. I would do this naked, but our garden is over-looked and I know the old man who lives next door watches me from his upstairs window. I see the glint reflecting from the lens of his binoculars. It gives me pleasure to know he’s watching but can’t see what he’d most like to see. I feel young and alive and healthy and immortal at these times.

  Lying in bed in the morning with the window open so that I can hear the early morning traffic and people hurrying to work when I have nothing to do gives me pleasure.

  Curling up on my lover’s lap while he reads or watches tv and I drift between waking and sleeping gives me pleasure.

  Waiting

  Our third date with Schumann. I wait and wait and Will doesn’t arrive.

  I detest hanging about, waiting for people who are late. I can’t do anything but wait. I was even worse when I was fifteen than I am now.

  Back and forth to the window. Sitting. Trying to read and not. Trying to listen to music and finding it irritating. Tidying my room. Back to the window.

  It was stupid, I knew. Ridiculous. I was as angry with myself for being like this as I was with Will for not arriving.

  An hour. Still he didn’t turn up.

  He was due at one that Saturday afternoon. I’d spent half the morning preparing. My hair was a mess whatever I did to it. My make-up was wrong. I had nothing to wear. Trying this, trying that, on and off and on again. Nothing. And all the time: anticipation, suppressed excitement, fantasies of how he could be, might be, wished he would be. Fears, anxieties, inadequacies gnawing at me – my ugly body, my terrible looks, my ghastly teeth, my rotten breath, my putrid sweat, my too small tits, my chubby bum, my wrongness for him.

  Staring in the full-length mirror every which possible way. The mirror my friend, the mirror my enemy. Every pore inspected close up. Pawing every pore, every imperfection, every blemish, every incipient pimple, second-guessing nature.

  Then telling my exasperated self, ‘To hell with him!’ and settling for myself. ‘I am what I am. Take me or leave me.’

  And waiting.

  And waiting.

  And still he doesn’t come.

  I began to hate him.

  I began to hate myself for being so bothered. Why should I care? Why did I care? Why did I allow myself to be so upset? Was he upset? How could I know? But whether he was or he wasn’t, I was only tormenting myself.

  Then, after an hour of wait-rage, a phone call. His father needed him to underbear. Short-handed. Unexpected. An emergency. Why, I asked, hadn’t he called earlier? Been trying to find someone else to do the job but couldn’t. Then he’d had to leave. A village funeral. Old-fashioned. Long. The service was going on in church. He’d nipped out to call me on his mobile. He was sorry.

  ‘Sorry!’ said I, furious, in a sulk, unforgiving. ‘So you should be!’

  ‘I’ll get there as soon as I can,’ he said, placatory.

  ‘Don’t bother!’ said I, tart as a lemon.

  ‘Got to go,’ he said and disconnected.

  I was so spitting angry I couldn’t spit. Pent-up wishes, unfulfilled hopes, ruined fantasies. How such disappointments consume you like a poison. And to make matters worse, telling him not to bother: cutting my nose off to spite my face.

  I was beside myself.

  I like that phrase, ‘beside myself’, it’s so right. At such times you do feel you’re two people – the angry one exploding your body, and the other you, watching – calm, cool, scornful of your tiresome anger.

  I rang Izumi. She came straight over.

  Izumi

  I used to wonder what I would do without Izumi. And sometimes I still miss her like you might miss an arm or a leg. We met when we were both thirteen soon after she came to England with her family. Her father was a businessman, an executive with a Japanese car firm which had a factory nearby. They stayed for four years before her father was sent back to Tokyo. We still email, but not as often as we used to. It’s hard to keep up a friendship when you never meet. We both said we would but we haven’t so far.

  She was very unhappy for the first few weeks after she arrived. Her English was good. But she looked scared most of the time and wouldn’t speak to anyone unless she really had to. When talking to teachers she hardly spoke above a whisper, so they gave up asking her anything because it was too embarrassing and they didn’t want to upset her. Some of the boys tried to chat her up – she was so beautiful they couldn’t help themselves – but the more they tried the more withdrawn Izumi became. After a while they left her alone, and, as boys do in defence of their hurt v
anity when suffering from a frustrated overflow of CHO, aka testosterone, they told each other that she was stuck-up and stand-offish, and no doubt went around kicking tin cans and wronging the ancientry before satisfying their desires by hand.

  At break and lunch times she would hide in some secluded place or sit in the library, keeping herself to herself.

  Though Izumi’s father, who’d lived in England before, had prepared her well, she still suffered from culture shock. And as none of us knew any Japanese or anything much about Japan, we did everything wrong. We would go up to her, for instance, trying to be friendly, look her straight in the eyes and smile, and say ‘Hi,’ and ‘Are you from Japan?’ and ‘Come and sit with us.’ We didn’t know this is not the Japanese way. They don’t look strangers in the eyes; they don’t rap out invitations that seem to say ‘take it or leave it’; they don’t say ‘I’d like this’ or ‘I think that’ or ‘No thanks, not now.’ Self-assertive in-your-face behaviour is regarded as rude and aggressive. Even for modern Japanese girls, Western boys – and even worse, Western men – can seem loud and threatening. No wonder Izumi was upset all the time.

  I took to her as soon as I saw her. She was from a different world, which made her interesting. But that aside, I loved her neat small body, her olive-toned silky skin, her delicate face with its almond eyes, and her long sleek raven-black hair, always perfectly cut and groomed, which curtained her face as she bent over her work or hung her head to avoid other people’s eyes. But much more drew me to her than her foreignness and her beauty. There was something magnetic about her, an aura. I immediately felt one of those intuitive certainties you can never quite explain that someone is just right for you, is a companion.

  Thank the lord I was savvy enough not to attempt to befriend her, because I saw how she rejected those who did. At thirteen, one thing I couldn’t handle was rejection. That’s one reason why I acquired my reputation among the boys of being hard to get and a sex-snob. But I wasn’t. It was self-defence, that’s all.

  Then, after lunch one sunny autumn day a few weeks after Izumi joined us, I wanted to be on my own and sat down by myself under a maple tree on the edge of the school field well away from the buildings. I didn’t know Izumi was sitting round the other side (do trees have sides?), where she hoped she wouldn’t be seen. But she sneezed. I peeked round to see who was there. She was eating lunch. She never ate school food but always brought her own Japanese-style food arranged like a work of art, a still life, in a black-lacquered box. Delicious. I’d spied on her at other times, always envying her exquisite lunchbox. She ate with chopsticks, delicately, slowly, almost as if performing a religious ritual. Watching her was like watching a play, I loved it, she was so studied and graceful and so wholly attentive to what she was doing. And I could imagine how our gobbling manners must offend her. I longed to learn how to eat like her, how to behave with such grace and unfussy careful elegant style. By comparison, I felt crude and coarse and brutish.