This Is All

by Aidan Chambers

  But whatever else happened during those first weeks, one routine was essential to Will and me. Every day without exception we always met somewhere private where we could consume each other with a harvest of kisses and soothe and excite each other with a repertoire of caresses, and hold each other so tight that if the laws of nature had allowed it our bodies would have melded into one. We touched and smelt and tasted and listened and gazed. I longed for this daily rehearsal of our senses from the moment I woke, and afterwards fed on it for the rest of the day, my body succulent with postprandial pleasure (and, need I add, craving for more), till I went to bed, where I relived it in memory and fell asleep to elaborate it in my dreams. We mapped each other’s body during these closeted times, discovered the places that we loved to visit and the fingering that pleased our desire.

  But there were no-go areas, and we never went beyond delicious foreplay. Somehow we managed to draw back, hold off, stop ourselves before reaching the overwhelming point of no return that Will called ‘the ring of singularity’. Looking back, I don’t know how we achieved this feat, for by the end of each meeting we were hot and panting and urgent. But in those early days of our love this was not discussed. We acted only on instinct, impulse, unspoken understanding. We had made an agreement not to go all the way till we were ‘ready’ and we stuck to it – whatever ready meant, which neither of us quite knew, believing that we would know it when the time came.

  We kept this up for two months. By the end of that time I was beginning to fret. The pressure inside me was at bursting point. My sixteenth birthday was imminent and I was still a virgin, the loss of which condition being the purpose that had started all this, falling in love being an accident that had got in the way. My mind was distorted by desire, my concentration on anything else completely blown, my resistance all but broken.

  Time to be decisive. There is a tide in the affairs of [wo]men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Time to make a move.

  Kaffeeklatsch

  ‘Need a kaffeeklatsch,’ I said.

  ‘With kaffee or without?’ Doris said.

  ‘We still haven’t. What shall I do?’

  ‘Men!’

  ‘He’s a boy, not a man. Maybe that’s the problem?’

  ‘The child is father to the man.’

  ‘Can’t help wondering. What would Mum have said?’

  ‘Always a mistake to second-guess the dead. They can’t answer back if you get it wrong.’

  ‘So what do you say?’

  ‘As your aunt, I’d say one thing. As your all-but-in-fact mother, I’d say another. When you were just a child, it was easy. Well, easier. But now you’re not a child I’m never sure which role I’m playing. Or which I ought to play.’

  ‘As my all-but mother?’

  ‘As your all-but mother I’d say wait. Don’t rush at it. You’re still very young. You’ve plenty of time. Are you quite sure he’s the right boy?’

  ‘And as my aunt?’

  ‘Get on with it. Just be sure you’re protected. It’s not such a big deal. Certainly not worth all the hassle you’re giving yourselves. Your school work matters just as much, if not more.’

  ‘I want to. But he won’t. Doesn’t. Whatever. Wants everything to be. You know. Right.’

  ‘Have you spoken to your father?’

  ‘Are you joking!’

  ‘It’s my auntly duty to enquire. He is your father, after all.’

  ‘Can’t ask him.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Doris! Because he is my father! Anyway, he’s too buzzed up with his new paramour. Probably needs a kaffeeklatsch more than I do.’

  ‘Don’t be too hard on him.’

  ‘On her, though. She gives me the heebies.’

  ‘So.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Some things can only be worked out by yourself. Nothing anyone says is any real help.’

  ‘Thanks a lot.’

  ‘It’s called growing up.’

  ‘O lordy!’

  ‘Darling?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Just get on with it.’

  Woman

  One of the things I like about being female is that I can switch about whenever I feel like it. I can wear a skirt today and jeans tomorrow, and no one minds. Which man, barring those who wear kilts, can wear jeans one day and a skirt the next without opprobrious comment? I can walk along with my arm through Izumi’s or round her, and kiss her, and dance with her, and no one cares a toss. Try that, if you’re a man, with your best male friend. I can lash on the make-up or go around as unadorned as a filleted fish. I can wear psychedelic green or flaming crimson or whatever colour I fancy. Sexually I can come and come again and again and again for as long and as often as I like (well, potentially anyway – and with practice and a little bit of help from a friend, I agree). Which man can do that, I’d like to know?

  I can do all this and much much more, which men cannot, because I’m a woman, the prototype, the first sex, the progenitor, the activator, the primary pattern. I’m the ancestral, the original, the aboriginal sex of which the male is merely a variant. And so I’m free to play as I wish, to try to be whatever I want to be, and discard each trial as I discard every month my unwanted and unused eggs.

  Which is why, I suppose, men have so often tried to restrict and enslave us. Because they know the Bible and all such male testaments got it wrong. Adam did not come first. Lilith, the first woman, came first. She came, and spawned Adam in her orgiastic joy. Though, as science has proved, we females do not need to have an orgasm simply to beget a child.

  Now we know for sure it isn’t god who reigns, but goddess. And we know as scientific fact, not as man-made myth, that women can do pretty well without men. Men exist because we, wishing it, allow them to exist. Scientifically speaking, we don’t need them any more. Some American macho male called Ernest Hemingway wrote a book called Men Without Women. What a toe-curling thought! A kind of hell, I should imagine. Not that I want a world of women without men. Not at all. A woman-only world would not, in my opinion, be more than a smidgeon better than a man-only world. But nevertheless, it’s true that men cannot be and cannot do without us. Without us they are nix. Quite simply impossible.

  Until men liberate themselves from the oppression they’ve made for themselves, until they free themselves from their confining taboos, their tongue-tied emotions, their blinkered eyes, their gummed-up ears, and their narrow-mindedness, they’ll remain impossible and fail themselves. There’s no place for men like that any longer.

  But have courage, boys. Not all men are laddo-men, not all men are dodo-dildo-machos. There is hope. For where there’s a Will there’s a way.

  Father’s day at the White Horse

  The day after my kaffeeklatsch with Doris, Dad said he wanted to take me out on Sunday for a special reason. Will had already planned to show me his old-old Tortworth tree, the one that meant so much to him, but Dad said it had to be that day and only Dad and me, couldn’t I put Will off? Will accepted the inevitable with a bad grace. Maybe, he fobbed, he’d take someone else instead. All right then, I said, do. Okay, he said, he would. Don’t talk like that, I said, it frightens me. Fuckit! he said. I wish, I wish, I said. Both of us spiteful with frustration.

  Some days shift your life into another key or change the beat to faster or slower or begin a new tune. That Sunday, two months after Will and I got together, brought all of those. A shift to a major key, a change to a faster beat, and the beginning of a new tune. I knew it at the time, recorded it at length the day after, remember it vividly still. And want to tell you about it as I remember it rather than as written at the time, because since then I’ve experienced more of life, which has helped me understand better what happened and what it all meant. So this is my story of Father’s day. Snapshots of an outing. A story album.

  In his car, Father and I, ten thirty on a November morning, Sunday roads still quiet, sun shining between meringue clouds onto crystal frost sparklin
g the fields.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Mystery tour,’ Dad said. ‘Journey back in time.’

  ‘Lordy!’

  Nothing more was said for miles. The car radio playing Dad’s kind of music. I wasn’t listening. Dad saving up whatever it was he wanted to say, me still sulking, my mind, as usual, on Will, wanting wanting.

  And brooding on the night before. I’d been to a party because Will’s band was playing. I hated it. The girls making up to the boys in the band. Making up to Will. The boys only interested in girls with big boobs and crotch-cut skirts and not those like me with small boobs and sloppy jeans. No possibility of competing or of revenge. Jealousy poisons the soul.

  Afterwards, walking me home, Will said, ‘Chavs – they’re a joke.’

  ‘Not to me,’ said I. ‘Nor the bimbos flashing their big boobs at you.’

  We sat in the bus shelter round the corner from our road, repairing the damage. A full moon. No clouds. Blue moonshine.

  ‘Small boobs,’ Will said, ‘turn me on – I mean seriously.’

  Later, very late, as I was putting the key in the door, Will said, ‘Write a song for me.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid!’ said I. ‘I can’t do that!’

  ‘Look,’ he said. ‘You know why I play with the band? Because I like playing the oboe, sure. But because playing in the band I don’t have to be with everybody else, doing what they’re doing. The girls like me because they think musicians are cool and I play music they like. Mostly, it’s not really my kind of music. But. I thought if you wrote us a song and I set it. Well … It would be ours. Yours and mine. Our kind. Come on – try,’ he said. ‘Do it for me.’

  Do it for him! Naked blackmale! But how could I not?

  ‘No promises,’ said I, with another kiss goodnight before closing the door between us.

  When you’re hot for a boy, do they know you’d do anything for them and work on that, or is it just an instinct because they are animales? Answer, based on cruel experience since then: It depends on the male. In Will’s case it was quite unconscious. He’d never have asked if he’d known what he was doing, he being the least predatory male I’ve ever met. He was all male and yet there was so little ani in him that he was an altogether unlikely male.

  Altogether unlikely. But altogether the unlikely boy for me.

  Wanting wanting.

  Dad stopped at a pub on the edge of a little village.

  ‘Coffee?’ he said. He was carrying a brown-paper parcel. ‘Too cold to sit outside?’

  ‘No. Brisk but nice.’

  We took our coffee to a table in the garden. There was a long view to the Berkshire downs. Sun shining gold on the escarpment.

  Dad put the parcel on the table between us and nudged it a touch towards me.

  ‘For you.’

  Heavy as stone. Inside the wrapping another in deep blue-green tied with crimson tape. An envelope attached, with my name on it. In the envelope a picture postcard. On the back, a message in Dad’s best travel agent’s handwriting, neat, almost print.

  To my only & precious daughter

  CORDELIA

  on her 16 birthday

  Many Happy Returns

  from your loving

  DAD

  ‘But it isn’t yet. Not for two weeks.’

  ‘I’ll be away. Freebie to Sardinia. Testing a new package holiday. And today’s another special anniversary. Well, two as a matter of fact. For me, and for you, though you don’t know it yet. So I thought we’d celebrate all three.’

  ‘What anniversaries?’

  ‘Patience. One at a time. Your birthday first. That’s the important one. Big day. When you were sweet sixteen. Want to open your present?’

  With picky care, I undid the tape and unfolded the wrapping.

  Two thick large heavy paperback books, one in lime green, one in cinnamon. Two volumes, but one book.

  * * *

  ALEXANDER

  SCHMIDT

  SHAKESPEARE

  LEXICON

  AND

  QUOTATION

  DICTIONARY

  EVERY WORD

  DEFINED AND LOCATED,

  MORE THAN 50,000

  QUOTATIONS IDENTIFIED

  in two volumes

  Volume I A–M

  Volume II N–Z

  * * *

  ‘Dad?’

  ‘Every word old Shaker used is in there, even “a” and “the”. All defined and explained. Many with quotes. And the plays where you’ll find them.’

  ‘Amazing! Am I ready for this? Maybe too much, even for me.’

  ‘You’ll grow into it. This guy Schmidt. Apparently a catalogue-brained German in the nineteenth century – a German, mind you, not an Englishman – who rated the Shaker so highly he did it as a labour of love. Some labour, some love! I mean, think of it. No computer to help him. Word by word, and the definitions and references and cross references and quotations and god knows what else, all written by hand on little cards, I guess, and filed and organised, and cross-referenced, then the whole bloody thing written out by hand. Imagine the work.’

  ‘The time it must have taken.’

  ‘I mean, it’s one thousand, two hundred and thirty-nine pages altogether. Two columns on every page, print the size you need a microscope to see, just about.’

  ‘Not quite, Dad. You need your eyes tested.’

  ‘I know. Bloody middle-age.’

  ‘Don’t start! … It’s really something, isn’t it. Pity you don’t like Shakespeare.’

  ‘Not exactly my pint of beer. Too verbose.’

  ‘Did you know he uses the biggest number of individual words of any writer in the English language?’

  ‘I’m not surprised.’

  ‘Twenty-three thousand. Give or take.’

  ‘Show-off. Don’t know where you get your liking for him from.’

  ‘Yes you do. Ms Martin.’

  ‘Ah, yes! Ms Martin. Bless her pedagogic socks. Teachers have a lot to answer for.’

  ‘You’re talking about yourself and your teachers, Dad, not about me and Ms Martin.’

  ‘That so?’

  ‘You blame Ms Martin for everything I do that you don’t like.’

  ‘Not everything. Your Aunt Doris mostly.’

  ‘Doris has always been good to me. And to you. You’d be in a pickle without her. Don’t know what you’ve got against her.’

  ‘She spoils you.’

  ‘Anyway.’

  ‘Anyway!’

  ‘Thanks thanks thanks for this.’

  ‘A pleasure.’

  ‘How did you know about it?’

  ‘Your old dad isn’t quite as stoopid as you take him for.’

  ‘Dad! Come on! Not allowed to be a bore on my non-birthday.’

  ‘The world wide web is wondrous. Bet old Shakes doesn’t use that word.’

  ‘Wondrous?’ I looked it up. ‘Yes he does, so there! Forty-five times, by a quick count.’

  ‘O, god! What have I let myself in for! Now I’ll not be able to say anything without you telling me how many times he uses it and in which plays and quoting the verbose old sod at me. Should have had more sense than to give you such a present to abuse me with.’

  ‘Won’t. Promise.’

  ‘Well, stop pawing the damn books. Leave them till later. Thought they might help with your exams.’

  ‘You’re a real fit wickedeeboo, you know that?’

  ‘Am I to understand you’re indicating I am a hip cool cat and all round regular groovy guy?’

  ‘You dig, man!’

  Laughing. Both of us.

  I leaned over the table to give him a thank-you kiss. He took my head in his hands and kissed me full-blooded on the lips. Hadn’t done that for months. And something more than just a return of thanks. Shocked me a lot. What had got into him?

  Drank some coffee to unkiss my mouth and looked at the view to cover my confusion.

  ‘You were beautiful from the mome
nt you were born,’ he said. ‘And look more like your mother every day.’

  O lordy! If he cries! He used to, whenever he mentioned Mum. He’d kept off the subject for a long time. Self-defence, poor man. There’s something very disturbing about your dad crying. And very touching as well. And if he cried now, I knew I would. And I didn’t want to. Not that day, and not there in the pub garden.

  As I write, you move inside me. A kick just then. Are my memories unsettling you too – or amusing you perhaps? It was a happy, not an angry kick. I know you well enough already to know which is which. Are you aware of what goes on in my mind? Does it enter you and become you as the food I eat enters you and turns into you? You’ve been inside me more than twenty-eight weeks. After twenty-eight weeks, so I’m told, you can hear sounds from outside and even smell smells, and detect sunlight. What will you be like on your sixteenth birthday? What will your father give you? What will he say? What will I? I plan to give you this book of mine on that important day. What will you think about it? I wonder.

  ‘Did you look at your card?’ Dad said, lifting it up and holding it out for me to see. ‘The picture.’