‘Not here,’ said I, taking his hand and pulling him after me, adding, ‘My room, my room, presto presto.’
It was onto the bed at once, the stage for a no-holds-barred passion play, mouths hands arms legs feet torsos rampant, our clothes soon dishevelled as by a tornado, kissing kissing kissing, panting rolling desperate as if the world would end in one minute flat.
And hot, naturally, and longing, wanting my clothes off, his clothes off, and began tugging and pulling at mine and his. I wanted to eat him and be enclosed by him, have him wrap me in him and him to be embedded in me and all at once now.
I’d never before felt the surge, the force, the power, the animal need of such desire. The imperative of it is violent.
‘Off off OFF!’ I guzzled.
And he did begin to unbuckle, unbutton, twitch off his boots, had even yanked off his T-shirt, before, like a swimmer surfacing from too deep a dive with only a last trace of breath left in his lungs, he suddenly pushed himself from me and lurched off the bed, tripping over my entangled legs, falling onto his backside on the floor in a manner that would have been too comic for words had we been observers and not participants in this furious drama (how farcical sex can be), and gulping at the air like a dying fish, he managed to say,
‘Not ready – not ready!’
‘All right, all right!’ I cried, as breathless as he and frustrated into the bargain, and lunged for the drawer in my bedside table, scattering my dear little alarm clock in the process, which, hitting the wall, broke into two and stopped (5:13 p.m.), and grabbed the carton of condoms Doris had so percipiently placed there.
‘It’s okay! – Look, look!’ said I, waving the prophylactics. But:
‘No,’ said Will, ‘no. Not that!’
‘What!’ said I. ‘I’m not on the pill.’
‘No. Don’t mean – Calm! – Get some air.’
He stumbled to the window, opened it, leaned his hands on the sill, gulping.
‘Matter?’ I said. ‘What’s matter?’ Full of worry now. ‘What did I do wrong?’
No reply, just panting gasps.
‘…Will!’
‘Not you,’ said he. ‘Wait.’
‘Wait!’ said I. ‘WHAT FOR? Come back! GET ON!’
But he merely flapped a hand at me as he drank the air.
I gave the bed a solid thump and yelled, ‘But Will!’ And wanted to burst into tears.
A hiatus. A colorado of disappointment. Him breathing. Me fuming. Then another thought.
‘It’s my period! Is that it? But it’s over.’
I was pleading, and hated myself for it.
He turned, looking at me. His face was the colour of cooked lobster and glazed in sweat (his sweat, his sweat!) as if just out of the pan, with the pained look on his face of same if still alive. I couldn’t help feeling sorry for him he was so clearly suffering.
He came back to the bed, stumbling a little – I’d seen him wobble in just this way after running a race. Sat on the bed. First side-saddle. Then, as if suddenly clear about his thoughts, swivelling and sitting cross-legged, facing me. Calmer now, both of us. Breathing almost normally. Almost.
‘Not that,’ said Will.
‘What, then?’
‘I do want you.’
‘And I want you.’
‘But,’ said he, looking at his feet, ‘not like this.’
‘Not like what?’
‘You know. Quick. A quick bang. Like we just wanted to get it over.’
A pause for thought.
‘But to be honest, Will,’ I said, ‘I suppose, that’s what I do want. To get it over.’
‘Why?’
‘Everybody says the first time – Well – You know – It kind of doesn’t usually. Go well.’
‘Who’s everybody?’
‘Will, you are impossible!’ I couldn’t help laughing.
‘But who?’
‘It doesn’t matter. Doris. The girls.’
‘Don’t care what they say.’
Pause.
‘No,’ I said. ‘But.’
‘Look. – Listen!’
‘I’m looking and I’m listening.’
‘The thing is. Whether it goes well or not. That’s not the point.’
‘Which is?’
‘We can only do it once.’
‘You mean, there’s only ever one first time?’
‘Exactly. We can’t say we didn’t like the way we did it, so let’s try again. It has to be. It will be. What it is.’
‘So—?’
‘Don’t you feel – when we do it – you want it to be – I dunno. As good as we can make it?’
‘Yes. Yes, I do.’
‘So—’
‘Let’s do it—’
‘The way we want it to be. Ergo?’
‘When?’
‘Where?’
‘How?’
‘The way—’
‘We want. O, Will,’ said I. ‘I do want you.’
‘And I want you, Cordelia. A lot. Very much. Maybe too much.’
‘Can you want someone too much?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Why?’
‘Dunno. Just what I feel.’
‘Because they might eat you up they love you so?’
He laughed.
‘Listen!’ I said. ‘Listen to me.’
‘I’m listening.’
‘You’re right. I see that now. I did want to get it over. Over and done with. Out of the way. People talk about it so much. The girls, I mean. But you’re right.’
‘So?’
‘So?’
‘What?’
‘Let’s think for a while. A day or two.’
‘Right.’
‘No longer though! Can’t bear it much longer.’
He laughed again. ‘Agreed.’
I took his head between my hands, pulled his face to mine, and kissed him delicato, dolce, lento, on his adorable lips.
And then we lay down on our sides, facing each other, his head on my pillow (I didn’t change the pillow case for two weeks), and gazed at each other till we were calm and peaceful enough and content enough to get up and use the bathroom (separately) and rearrange our clothes and ready ourselves to be sociable with Doris and go downstairs and watch television, hand-in-hand on the sofa, till Doris returned, and yes, she was bearing three fresh – well: refrigerator fresh – lobsters.
In lieu of washing up, which he offered to do, Doris made Will play an oboe solo for her after dinner. And to round things off she played the piano for us.
When Will had gone, I said to Doris, ‘Well? What do you think?’
‘He plays well.’
‘You know what I mean.’
‘You can tell everything about someone from the way they play.’
‘And? … And?’
‘I invited him to dinner, didn’t I? I fed him fresh lobster – lobster, for heaven’s sake! You know I dislike the wretched things. What more need I say? And you? How did you get on?’
There are times when Doris won’t discuss matters. Only when she thinks the time is right. But, thought I, two can play that game.
‘He was still here when you came back, wasn’t he?’ said I. ‘What more need I say?’
Dreaming
Last night I dreamt that I was giving birth to a cat. A black cat with long fur and red eyes. In the dream this seemed entirely normal. When I woke I thought I must be going mad. And felt for a while uneasy. What do I have inside me, a cat? I’m not a cat person. Not a dog person either, though the world seems to be divided between those who are one or the other. I’m not an animal-in-the-house person at all. Not a pet-animal person. Not a zoo person either. I’m a wild-animals-in-the-wild person. I did once, when I was about eight, want to have a tortoise (which Dad refused). Can’t think why. Perhaps because I liked the story of the tortoise and the hare, in which the tortoise won a race against the hare by plodding steadily along, while the hare was so arrogantly confident tha
t he sat down and took a nap, sure that he could easily win. I suppose I’m a bit of a tortoise, I just keep plodding whatever anyone else does, and whether they think I can succeed or not.
At my antenatal group this afternoon, where they teach us how to give birth properly and the kind of therapy stuff that mildly irritates me but which we are made to feel duty-bound to attend to, I reported my dream, thinking everyone would find it as weird as I did. But not at all. Just about everyone in the group had dreamt of giving birth to something strange. One had dreamt she was giving birth to a monkey, another to a fish (yuk!), one even to a snake, which she could describe so precisely someone identified it as a sidewinder, which is not a serpent you would want to get in the way of at the best of times, never mind when it’s coming out of your insides.
Once again it seems that where human beings are concerned, nothing is beyond imagination. If you can think of it, you can be sure someone has already done it. Fancy, therefore, dreaming you’re giving birth to an elephant, or a blue whale (biggest animal in the whole world, bigger than a jumbo jet). Birthing a butterfly, say a swallow tail or a meadow blue, might be quite nice (all that lovely fluttering of the wings as it left the uteral passage). But an ant or a flea or, grief!, a centipede, or an octopus (all those arms!), or a porcupine (the spines!). I shall be quite relieved, I can tell you, when I see you enter the world an ordinary, everyday, common-or-garden real live human baby girl, thank you. If you happen to give any thought, my little one, to becoming something else, forget it.
Also while I am on the subject of you and the effects you’re having on me now, when there are three months left, I can report that from about three months till about six months of being pregnant, I felt sexually turned on all day and especially at night. Not, however, in the way that makes you want to jump on someone, but in a private way, a feeling all for myself. And my dreams were not about popping cats, but were very sexy, very explicit. My sweet doc told me she’d felt just the same during the same months of her pregnancy and that this too is quite normal. The sexy dreams are caused by high blood pressure. How banal! But then during the last three months on which I am now started, she warned me that the sexiness disappears, and instead you have to pee all the time, which of course considerably reduces any thought of sexual romance. Though I do enjoy, I must admit, giving your father the pleasure he deserves and enjoys, and employing entertaining and suitable ways to satisfy him. He’s deliciously tender and delicate with me these days (not that he wasn’t before, but even more so at the moment), which I like too. But perhaps it’s best to remain silent about these matters till the day comes when we can talk about them woman to woman. I look forward to that day very much. Perhaps I’m like this because my mother isn’t around. I think I miss her more now that I’m about to become a mother than I did when I was a girl.
Routine pleasures
After our Sunday of running and kissing and upset and our meeting for musical reconciliation, Will and I slipped into a kind of routine. I’ll describe it as coolly as I can, though it was anything but cool at the time.
At seven in the morning (he could be infuriatingly punctual), Will would call me on my mobile to say hello, wake up, get up, sleep slob (getting up, and hellest of all, getting up early, was never my strong point). Sometimes we’d talk for a few minutes, that nice kind of half-asleep talk, or tease and joke, and sometimes, depending on our mood or the day ahead, we’d say hello and nothing more.
Three times a week we’d go running (he could be infuriatingly disciplined about homework and music practice and suchlike). My morning rituals (which if I’m honest were and still are as infuriatingly inviolable as his) require at least half an hour in the bathroom, pooing, showering, hair-tending, followed by at least half an hour in my room, dressing and, as Dad called it with deliberate intent to annoy, ‘titivating’. (He pretends to be chauvinist, but it’s a pretence about as convincing as a puppy dog playing Rottweiler.) Then breakfast, which took all of ten minutes as I never wanted more than a glass of orange juice, a slice of toast and marmalade, and a mug of tea. (I hate running on an empty stomach.)
On days when I didn’t run I did fifteen or twenty minutes of piano, which got my brain and body working again and made sure I got in some practice, in case there was no time later. The piano in my Dad-home room was an electronic keyboard, which I could play mute, listening on headphones, so as not to disturb the neighbours, i.e. Dad and any visiting sleepers, Dad being even worse than me in the early morning. At Doris’s I played the Bösendorfer as fortissimo as I liked in the luxury of her music room.
Playing was ended by Will pulling up on his scooter at eight thirty on the dot. From the Monday after our reconciliation he picked me up every school day. By the end of the first week everyone had decided we were an item. There was teasing at first, naturally, and some surprise that I of all the possibilities was Will’s choice. I said nothing about him being my choice, but only smiled with what I hoped was Sphinxian inscrutability, or at the least like the cat who had got the cream. A few of the chavs went further than teasing, as you’d expect. You’ll know the kind of thing. Like holding a door open in the corridor and letting it swing back just at the precise moment when it would thump into my arm and send files and textbooks and bag and whatever tumbling to the floor, requiring that I grovel among the clod-bashing feet of the poltruding horde to retrieve my stuff, accompanied by the perpetrator’s exaggerated cries of apology and mock-shock-horror at my ‘accident’. There were also the usual worn-out remarks and tired jests of the jealous and bird-brained, which it would be boring to repeat for they’ll be tediously familiar to you.
I never told Will about this nor asked him whether he suffered boy-versions of such behaviour. Not just because this is the kind of thing we don’t tell the boys, but mainly because I was determined from the start not to allow school to intrude on our friendship. I wanted us to belong to a special separate world, and I wanted to insulate us from anything that might sully or wound or injure ‘my Will’. For quite soon I came to think of him as ‘mine’, and to fear that someone might take him from me.
My Will. From the moment I fell in love with him, William Blacklin was to me the most beautiful human being imaginable. There were times when I would lie awake at night angsting that an accident on his scooter – or later the car he was given when he was old enough – or some gross disease would disfigure him for life. This was an entirely selfish worry, I now understand. It was for myself that I didn’t want his beauty to be harmed. But perhaps first passionate young love is always selfish – perhaps all passionate love is, young or old? I wouldn’t know about the old kind yet. But this was a lesson I was to learn the hard way.
Phoning. During the first four weeks of our friendship, we kept out of each other’s way in school, not even meeting up at break or lunch times. But during lunch time, we would phone each other or text, and decide whether or not we would meet straight after school or later, depending on homework, music lessons and practice, family arrangements, etc. At the weekends, he would call as usual in the early morning while we were both still half asleep, and on those days we would talk for ages, and gossip and discuss music and anything else of interest, and sometimes just lie there saying nothing, but listening to each other breathe, and end the call at last by arranging the rest of the day. They were often the nicest times, needing only Will lying beside me in the flesh to make them perfect.
Also regularly:
Running. As I said Will made me run with him at least three times a week, either in the morning or during the weekend. I needed the exercise, he said, I wasn’t doing my health any good by missing out such an essential. On the first Saturday of our routine he turned up with a grey-blue tracksuit for me: a present bought from Oxfam. And though I thought it made me look like two sacks of potatoes tied in the middle, I wore it to please him.
Reading. I made Will promise to read every book I asked him to read, a promise he made with good grace and a resigned shrug.
; ‘I am not,’ I told him, ‘putting up with a boyfriend who can’t talk to me about stuff I’ve read. And anyway, you’re not doing your mental health any good by missing out on such an essential.’
‘Quid pro quo,’ said Will.
‘QED,’ said I.
Music. He set us another piece to practise together, Henri Dutilleux’s Sonata for piano and oboe. Very beautiful, very difficult. But Will never did like anything that was easy. If it isn’t difficult, he said, it isn’t worth doing. In that case, I said, I shall make myself as difficult as I possibly can. Which won’t be difficult for you, he replied.
Daydreaming. At first I wanted to be with him all the time – so what’s new? – suffering agonies when we weren’t or couldn’t be. I sat through lessons unable to think about anything but him; and daydreamed about the things we might do together; endlessly doodling his name; composing love letters that I never sent because they were too embarrassing; making lists of every detail about him that I loved. Sitting next to me in class one day, Izumi wrote on my rough book, ‘Toritsukareta-mitai-ni, William-ga-suki. Means: Being haunted-as-if, William-love.’
Improvisation. But soon I began to like it that each day was different, without a set pattern. Improvisation on a seven-bar theme. And admitted to myself that this was right for me. It suited my temperament. I’d observed how old couples seemed to like, even to need regular routines, the unvarying rituals of their daily lives. Perhaps this is something you do need when you’re old. I didn’t know, nor did I much care. Old was a time out of sight in the future; this was now. For me – and it’s still true – unvarying regularity would be death. Perhaps because after my mother died I never had the programmed life so many children grow up with. I lived with Dad or with Doris. Two different kinds of home, two different kinds of parent. My days were shaped and shifted by the unpredictable requirements of their work and Dad’s latest female enthusiasm and Doris’s comings and goings, never quite feeling I belonged with either. I became accustomed, conditioned I suppose, to irregularity and unexpected changes, and to looking after myself. Though I did sometimes long ‘to be normal’, for settled stability and life in one home, and, most of all, a constant lover-friend. In fact, one of my favourite daydreams about Will and me was of us living together day and night on our own in some out-of-the-way place, preferably by the sea, never apart, always together, our lives fused and everything shared.
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