This Is All

by Aidan Chambers

  In my opinion, sleep is a great and wonderful mystery, a magic part of life.

  Graceful people, graceful things

  A simple black well-cut dress.

  The way Izumi eats.

  Jasmine tea in a snow-white cup with no handles and blue flowers on it.

  A black cat stretched out along the top of a brick wall in the sunshine.

  I sat back, releasing him. And waited. It was now or never.

  He was silent. Hanging in the balance.

  Then he stood up. Like he was lifting a weight off me. (Success!)

  I heard myself say, quite without meaning to, ‘I love you, Dad. I love you both. Tell Doris I’m sorry. I’ll see you tomorrow.’

  He stopped at the door. Turned. Looked at me. And said, ‘Doesn’t your old dad deserve a goodnight hug?’

  ‘Course!’ I said and embraced him.

  When he’d gone, I went to my room, feeling like I’d just climbed a mountain, flopped onto my bed, held the egg in my hands, and let out a body-emptying sigh.

  How good to be alone. No one to attend to. No one to please.

  I’ve learned I need time on my own in my own space. I need it no matter how happy I am, no matter how much I love someone. One of the necessities of life. Will was like that too; one of the reasons we got on so well. We each needed times apart, times to ourselves in our own rooms. And silence then. Which, as I’ve told you, was something I recognised at Ms Martin’s. Silence. Silence as active as the sea. To swim into the depths of it, like exploring a vast, a limitless ocean. I couldn’t live without it.

  I must have fallen asleep. The next thing I remember was a call from Will wanting to know what had happened since we parted earlier that day, which seemed like a week. I talked and talked, pouring it all out. Will was always a good listener. Another of the qualities that helped us get on so well.

  And when I’d talked myself out, Will’s lovely quiet reassuring voice saying, ‘Want me to come over?’ and me saying, ‘Please. Yes please.’

  Even though we didn’t get to sleep until after three, I was stark awake by six. There was too much going on inside me.

  The long slim neck of a ballerina.

  A person who listens attentively without interrupting mid-sentence.

  Izumi when she says nothing in lessons for days and then comes up with one brilliant idea expressed in her Japanese English.

  A candle flame in a dusk-dark room.

  A new moon when it is barely more than an arc of white.

  A bright full moon shining in a cloudless daytime sky.

  Ms M. when she is teaching and suddenly recites one of her favourite poems to us from memory and then goes on with the lesson without any explanation.

  Will when playing his oboe for me alone in Doris’s music room.

  Will when drying himself after a shower.

  A heron standing on one leg like a ballet dancer on a riverbank.

  Music, music, music.

  Will when he is fast asleep.

  Actors when they take their bows after a not-so-good performance.

  Trees on busy roadsides in cities.

  A novel that ends in exactly the right way.

  People who can be simple when everyone else is trying to be smart and clever.

  An old man talking to a small child, not as a grownup nor as a child, but as an equal.

  Old people waiting patiently for a bus in the cold.

  A new loaf of brown granary bread with one slice cut off it.

  My granddad when sitting silently by his father’s grave.

  Will’s hand resting on my knee while he is absorbed in a book.

  Will was dead to the world. I’ve never known anyone who fell asleep so quickly, or slept so soundly, or was so fresh as soon as he woke.

  I got up and sat in my chair, wrapped in my dressing gown, alternating my brooding gaze between the somnolent body of my gorgeous Will, sprawled like a naked god, my Adonis, across my bed, and the mist-veiled street outside my window.

  Cruising above the mist in the dawn sky were a pair of buzzards who lived in a wood not far away. I’d watched them often, surfing the air, sailing, gliding, wheeling slowly. I would only know they were there from their sharp high-pitched cries to each other, for though they were the largest birds in the area by far, they were hard to spot until they turned at exactly the right angle in their looping flight, when I could pick out the dark broad shape of their wings against the sky. They were like elusive old friends. And that morning, as I watched their aerial flirt I thought of them as Will and me, because they were always together and were always talking to each other and were always on their own and were so different from all the other birds – which sometimes mobbed them, especially those loud-mouthed pesky chavs, the magpies and jackdaws.

  Meanwhile, I was broody with thoughts that couldn’t be expressed in straightforward words – loose images, like fugitive pieces from a jigsaw puzzle, and scraps of turbulent phrases, and crazy questions, accompanied by surges of feelings that came whirling through my body.

  After a while these segments of thought and currents of feeling gathered into a mope, as if attracted by a magnet into a verbal forcefield.

  I didn’t know then where my mopes come from and I do not know now. They arrive like gifts from nowhere, offered to me by someone unknown. (Why me, I ask, why me?) Sometimes they rise up inside me like fish from the deep, alive and fully formed. All I have to do is land them. They

  A person who asks exactly the right question in exactly the right way at exactly the right time.

  A half-used turquoise pencil lying on a blank page, just before I pick it up to write with it.

  From where I sit

  From where I sit I see the moon.

  Daytime.

  From where I sit I see the moon in sunlight.

  Night and day.

  From where I sit in my mother’s chair.

  Think of something else.

  What else?

  What else is there?

  My hand.

  My hand on the arm of my mother’s chair.

  My hand where my mother’s hand has rested.

  No more.

  No. More.

  My mother’s hand in my hand on my mother’s hand on the arm of my mother’s now my chair.

  And in mother in her hand in my hand on her chair.

  How many mothers in my hand?

  And my daughter’s hand in me.

  No more.

  The moon.

  In the sunlit sky.

  From where I sit.

  Try again.

  My room.

  Seven metres by five by two-point-five by my life by night and day.

  In and out.

  How many times?

  seem to write themselves; I’m only their secretary. Others begin as a single lonely segment, a phrase or a line, rising to the surface one day, another segment another day, and so on till I realise I’ve gathered a complete whole. If I grow impatient to be finished and invent the missing parts, the mope doesn’t work very well because the made-up parts are never as good as those that rise to the surface of their own accord. Worst of all is when only one segment bobs to the surface and I know after waiting a while that no more will ever appear, no matter how long I wait. Then I have to make up the rest. That’s the hardest work and the most likely to fail.

  The mope I wrote that morning is special to me. It rose to the surface complete and ready for the page. I jotted it down in seconds. Even as I did so, I was aware that something different was happening. The first of my mopes I could allow myself to call a poem. But just as I didn’t know where its words and images came from, I didn’t know why it was a poem and not a mope or what it meant or why it had been given to me at that moment. I think I do now, but that’s now and I am telling you about then. All I knew was that it was a poem for Will, that it was about Will and me, and that it was about what we meant to each other.

  seek me where

  you woul
d not look

  find me in

  terraces of the mind

  let midnight rain

  scour my body

  carry me to a place

  where owls cry

  and the moon beams

  before the sun burns

  the heart

  fill me with

  How many hours in how many hours out is it worth figuring?

  When I am out am I gone?

  My mother in me in my room.

  Inhabited.

  To go is to stay.

  To leave is to remain.

  No more.

  Try again.

  From where I sit.

  The moonstruck sky.

  Silence.

  Nothing.

  Nothing will come of nothing.

  Sea surge in my shell.

  Pulse beat rise and fall in my breast.

  Blood. Breath.

  Moonshine.

  Again.

  Here I sit in my mother’s chair.

  Me.

  Why? Why me?

  Why not someone else?

  Why at all?

  Imagine nothing.

  Being nothing.

  And again.

  Afterwards.

  Not I. Nothing.

  Not imaginable.

  No more.

  More.

  Try again.

  Only once.

  No second time.

  weaving light

  bed me deep

  in its embracing roots

  beneath an oak

  curl round its branches

  brood on love

  born in the soul

  After the pleasure of writing my mope/poem, I wanted the pleasure of Will again. It’s often like that – after the excitement and release of making a poem, which is making love with words, I wanted the excitement and release of making love with my body.

  Will stirred as I climbed onto the bed. I cradled him to me, kissed him lightly on his hot brow, on his small pretty ear, on his bristly cheek, on the curving side of his nose, on the closed bulge of his eye, while with my cool hand I stroked the valley of his spine. He turned onto his back and stretched like a petted animal. I kissed his lips, and drifted my hand between his legs, and feathered him with my fingertips. He crooned and purled. Lordy, but I did enjoy making love to him in his morning limbo more than at any other time! His sleepy mind, being silent, didn’t hamper his pliant body. His unguarded skin was keen to my every slightest touch. During our months together, I’d practised this art as diligently as he ensured we practised our music-making; by now I knew the repertoire that raptured him the most.

  (I have to tell you that of all the glories of life, in my experience none surpasses making love with a beloved lover.)

  Afterwards, we slept again till ten, when I was woken by Will returning from the bathroom ‘with naked fote stalking in my chambre’.

  He nuzzled me and said, ‘Come on, Leah. Up. Now! Run, shower, breakfast, music.’

  ‘I hate you,’ I said. ‘Liam!’

  No again.

  Unbearable being not being.

  Being a mother-to-be sitting in mother’s chair being me with the sunshine moon.

  Life.

  Enough.

  Not Mean, but Be (Part II)

  I’ve been trying to work out what Ms F-T means by saying that a poem must not mean, but be.2 These are some of my conclusions.

  My first conclusion is that I do not understand exactly what Ms F-T means, but whatever she means I do not entirely agree. This is why:

  A poem is made of words. All words mean something. If they did not, they would not be words. The whole point of words is to mean something.

  Also, when words are put together in groups (e.g. phrases, sentences, paragraphs, etc.) they mean something as a group. That is, they mean more than they mean as individual words. And the whole point of putting them together is to mean something and to communicate this meaning to other people. (Of course it is possible to combine words in a way that makes them make nonsense.)

  Poems are made of words, grouped together, and therefore they must mean something. They cannot help it. Unless they are put together deliberately to make nonsense, which is pointless, except as a joke.

  I said the above to Ms M. She agreed, but then said I should try what she called ‘a thought experiment’. She said I should think of myself as a poem and see if this helped me to understand what Ms F-T was getting at.

  At first this seemed silly, but I tried in order, as usual, to please her.

  ‘Hate with love is love without hate.’

  ‘O no, please, please!’

  ‘D’you think that’s true?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. Who said it?’

  ‘Me. I just made it up.’

  ‘O god! Leave me alone. I want to sleep.’

  ‘No you don’t. Come on. Arise, bright angel.’

  By the time we’d got back, showered together, had a long jokey breakfast, and practised our music, it was one o’clock. Will had to help his father with a funeral that afternoon and play at a gig that evening.

  We did everything a little too intensely that morning, a little out of control, a little over the top. And we avoided the topic that caused our manic behaviour – Will’s departure for college in two weeks. Fourteen more days, fourteen more nights before the separation that would end these ten months of love-making. Sometimes we’d said that his going away wouldn’t change anything between us, but I at any rate secretly feared it would. They say that the one who leaves is the one who smiles, the one who stays behind is the one who cries, and I think that’s mostly true.

  That afternoon, as I entered her classroom, Ms Martin was standing in front of the open book cupboard, her bronze hair gathered back in a knot held by an elastic band, her neat small body draped in the same sleeveless blue dress she’d worn the day before, her legs, like her arms, tanned and bare, her feet in clumpy trainers – the private Ms M. again. She sneezed as I closed the door, and looking round with watering eyes, smiled and said, ‘There you are. Dust. Sorry. Allergic.’

  ‘Would you like me to do that?’

  ‘Would you? Shakespeare on the top shelf, poetry next in alphabetical order of author, then plays ditto, followed by novels.’

  The kind of job I’d have grumbled about doing at home

  I began by asking myself, ‘Do I mean or do I be?’ This sounded even sillier than thinking of myself as a poem but I couldn’t think how else to put it, except as follows:

  Am I a meaning or am I a being?

  The answer was obvious. I am a being. I am a human being, which is a particular kind of animal. I am a female, which is a particular kind of human being. I am a female human being because of the particular way I am made out of the raw materials that make all life. But the raw materials have been combined in a way that is special to (a) human beings, (b) female human beings, and (c) this particular female human being called Cordelia Kenn, who is living at this particular time in this particular place on this particular planet in this particular solar system of this particular universe.

  Conclusion: I am a being because of how I am made, and when and where I was made. O yes, and by whom I was made, which was my parents (who were made by their parents, who were made by their parents, and so on back to the very beginning).

  Question: Do I mean anything?

  Answer (after a lot of thought): Yes. I mean what I am. I am Cordelia Kenn. I am my life. My life means me. To understand me properly, you have to know who I am.

  If a poem is like that, then it is a poem because it is made of words put together in a particular kind of way in a particular time and a particular place by a particular person (who is the poem’s parents).

  Question: But surely prose is also like that? If so, why is poetry poetry and why is prose prose?

  This is a very difficult question, and to be honest, no one I asked gave me a satisfactory answer. They all waffled.

  Ms M. refused,
saying the point was that I should answer the question myself. She really is infuriating sometimes. (But I love it that she is so strict with me, because otherwise I just duck out of trying.)

  but tackled happily for Ms M., who set to with pins and Blutak, fixing pictures and posters and sample work to the display boards. How self-contained and self-confident she is, I thought as I regimented the books, and wondered if I would ever achieve such balance, and also thought how I too had two personas, one for home and one for school, so I shouldn’t be surprised that she had. At home I could be sulky and petulant and volatile and lazy and all over the emotional shop whereas at school I was always well-behaved and reasonably diligent, called by the chavs when we were in junior school a teachers’ pet (I did rather suck up, I must admit), and later a swot (which I wasn’t, not like Will, who got by without abuse because he was athletic and male and good-looking – the chavs lusted after him – as well as studious. I did like studying the things that really interested me, e.g. Shakes and poetry and music, but I wasn’t a real scholar like Will – someone who enjoys studying for its own sake and is meticulous).

  How strange a school is when it’s empty, I thought, as I brought a chair so that I could organise the novels without bending down. A tomb without bodies but full of sleeping ghosts which the slightest sound might waken. Even the smell is a decaying relic of gamy life. The air is tethered. The silence is heavy. Its key is melancholy E minor. (Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony, a favourite which Will had given me on CD as a New Year present, is in E minor; the second movement would fit the bill precisely.) To be in tune with the place I felt I should lay myself out on a table like one of those stone corpses in ancient churches, with a pillow under their head and a little dog at their feet, their hands on their chests in the prayer position, and a memorial inscription carved beneath them, of which mine would read ‘Here lies the body of Cordelia Kenn. She died as a student of what, why and when.’ I smiled to myself at this dippy thought and at the glowing memory of writing my first proper poem in the