This Is All

by Aidan Chambers

  ‘Please yourself, sir,’ said the waiter, and sashayed off.

  I set to and while I was winkling the meat out of the claws with the poker, Mr Malcolm appeared at our table, dangling a bottle of wine by the neck.

  ‘Forgive the intrusion,’ he said to Will. ‘Celebrating?’

  Will, summoning the kind of dutiful politeness you keep specially for the boring friends of your parents, said, ‘End of school. Exam results. Last night before college.’

  ‘Congratulations.’ Mr Malcolm raised the bottle to view. ‘A nice chablis.’ He looked me over. ‘Go well with your lobster.’ And to Will: ‘May I? To mark the occasion.’

  Will nodded. Mr Malcolm looked at me.

  ‘I’d like that very much,’ I said, over-compensating for Will’s lack of enthusiasm. ‘Thanks.’

  Mr Malcolm poured.

  ‘My best to your father,’ he said to Will. ‘And my wife sends greetings to your mother.’ To me and to Will, ‘All success with whatever you do in the future.’

  He put the bottle down on the table.

  ‘You’re very kind,’ I said, performing again, but meaning it too.

  people and about life and about God – whatever ‘God’ meant. But she also saw that she had never really believed the stories were literally true. O yes, she said, she accepted that there had been a man called Jesus and that he had been crucified. But she couldn’t accept that he was literally the son of God or that he was literally born of a virgin. Nor could she believe that he literally rose from the dead and was literally taken up into heaven a few weeks later (escalated to the penthouse, as Old Vic put it).

  These, she said, were stories; they were metaphors. And that was okay. She had no problem with metaphors. In fact, language, she said, and our ways of thinking about anything are actually metaphors. We are, she said, only the stories – only the metaphors – we tell about ourselves. But as she understood it, Christianity required its followers to believe that the stories about God and Christ actually happened and were literally true. And you had to swear you believed this every time you said the Creed during the Mass. And she was no longer prepared to do this. So she gave up her Christian faith.

  There were other less important reasons as well. For instance, the male-dominated paternalism of Christianity. She had tried hard to think of this as just a part of the way life has been since ancient times, and that it was changing now. Male domination was on the way out. Not fast enough, but on the way. And in some of the Christian churches there was less of it than there used to be. In her own denomination, for example, the Anglican Church, there were women priests now. But Ms M. had come to the conclusion that the idea of male supremacy was so deeply ingrained in Christianity that it could never actually be got rid of. In Christianity, God was a ‘He’ and Christ was male, and the Virgin Mary was a compliant, eyes down, supplicant mother ready to do the will of her husband-father-God, and would never be an equal.

  This couldn’t be changed because it was the way the story

  ‘My pleasure,’ he said. ‘Really.’ He nodded to Will. ‘Enjoy your meal.’ And returned to his overdressed wife.

  Will closed down. I once watched one of those awful Second World War movies about a submarine. They were being attacked and went into what they called ‘silent running’, which as far as I could make out meant proceeding underwater without making any noise that could be detected by enemy ships on the surface. I used to think Will was silent running when he was in this mood. I knew him so well I could guess what he was thinking about Mr Malcolm and the wine and the restaurant and our dinner. The whole thing was going from bad to worse. But I couldn’t raise enough energy to tackle him about it.

  I poked and picked at my lobster. Fish and chips beside our kissing tree would have been better. Will could have been as scratchy as he liked and it wouldn’t have mattered. I could have tickled him out of it. And could have dunked him in the river if necessary to cool him off. At least that would have been fun. This was agony.

  I drank some of the wine. Will didn’t touch it. Out of pique. But it was wasted on me as I had no idea whether it was ‘a nice chablis’ or plonk. The irony of which – wasted wine as a gift from a man in waste disposal – gave me a rueful mental smile.

  Why, I wondered once again as I struggled through the meal, why can’t people just enjoy things? Why do they allow stupid feelings to poison what should be happy times? And why am I as bad as everyone else? Though I did think Will could have made more of an effort, could have put himself out a bit more. I knew he hated pretending. But sometimes pretending is necessary, it seemed to me. Sometimes, as Dad put it, ‘behaving as if helps oil the wheels of life’. I could have done with Will using some of that oil. He wasn’t the only one who was suffering. I was too. I was about to lose him, I was convinced of it. This might not only be our last meal

  about God had to be told in Christianity. The metaphor couldn’t be changed just by changing the pronoun for God from He to She. (And even if you did that, you only shifted the domination from the male to the female, and that wasn’t right, wasn’t true, either.)

  There was something else as well. The Christian faith had become a rigid structure. The churches – each one of them, whatever their denomination – had turned Christianity into a system, an institution. It had a hierarchy of archbishops and bishops and various ranks of priests who ran their church as a business organisation, which owned vast amounts of land and property and traded in stocks and shares and owned newspapers and even banks and was ruled by politics and money.

  Some people like this. They are comfortable and reassured by an organisation that tells them what to think and how to behave. And it provides them with a social life – a group of like-minded people to belong to – as well as spiritual and social security. The thing most people fear the most, Ms M. said, is loneliness. They cannot bear to be on their own, not just physically but spiritually. They prefer to belong to a herd, a tribe, a gang, a group. They prefer to believe anything, no matter how odd, than nothing.

  ‘During my weeks of convalescence,’ Ms M. said, ‘I began to think of the Christian faith in the past tense. As something finished. Or, if not finished, on its last legs. I decided I wanted to go on from there, and to think out for myself what God is, what I really do believe about God, what it means to have a soul, and what it means to be myself. I wanted to work this out and work out how to express the truths I found in a way that is true for now, and how to give these truths power in my own life.

  ‘All I knew to begin with,’ she went on, ‘was that God was to be found in what I’d come to call the Silence, and that the truth was that I myself, and everything in the world, everything in the entire universe, was a part of God. God was

  before we were separated for a while, it might also be the last meal we’d ever have as – I hesitated to think the word – lovers.

  I poked hard at the half-empty carcass of my lobster. But I was digging hard at myself really. Poking at myself. It was all my fault, wasn’t it? This meal. Will in such a mood. Things not being right. I should have managed everything better. My fault. All my stupid fault. I wasn’t good enough for him. And now he was going away and he would find someone who was good enough for him, someone who could be all he wanted and could match him and win his love and keep him. And so I berated myself with another of the fatal flaws of womankind, blaming ourselves for whatever goes wrong, and not the man we love.

  We left as soon as we could. At least we didn’t have Mario to contend with. His night off, apparently. Luckily, the Malcolms had already gone, so they didn’t see us abandon their bottle of wine still three quarters full.

  We walked back to my place, saying nothing. Will dithered on the doorstep. I wanted him to come in but wasn’t going to press him. I opened the door and waited. He stubbed his toe, so to speak, a couple of times. I was about to shut the door in his face, having had quite enough. But at the last moment he followed me inside.

  It wasn’t long, thank all the g
ods, the ancient fates and the care of providence, before we were in bed together and could reconnect again.

  Will slipped away at about five next morning. He had to be ready to leave by eight. His father was driving him to college with all his kit and gear.

  ‘Don’t come to see me off,’ he said.

  ‘But I want to.’

  ‘Dad will fuss. Mother will hover. You know what she’s like. She’ll not give us a second to ourselves. Look – I know she tried to split us up.’

  all and in all. This was what I knew for sure. And I knew that I had to go on a lonely journey to find out what it meant.’

  ‘And you’re still looking?’ I said.

  ‘I’m still looking. It’s a slow business, but that’s okay. I’ve got the rest of my life to do it. Maybe that’s what life is. Not the journey of your body from birth to death, but the journey of your soul in its search for God.’

  ‘Does the wooden – I don’t know what to call it – thing – on your wall have something to do with your belief now?’

  ‘Yes it does. It’s a kind of icon.’

  ‘What does it mean?’

  She laughed and stood up. ‘That’s a story for another time. I’ve told you more than enough for today. Don’t want to give you indigestion.’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘I know she gave you a going over for saying you’d do anything, live with me and get a job.’

  ‘Why didn’t you say? O, Will!’

  ‘Disloyal. Not honest. Awkward. Not right.’

  ‘Never mind that now. But I must see you off. I must.’

  ‘I couldn’t stand it. Too many crossed wires. Better here.’

  He held me at half arm’s length, his eyes, those eyes, looking straight, unblinking, into me.

  He kissed me. Not deep, not long. A goodbye kiss. Smiled. And was gone.

  And still he hadn’t said he loved me.

  The one who leaves is the one who smiles.

  The one who cries is the one who stays behind.

  1 I’ve nothing against being a mother. How can I? I’m giving birth to you because I want to. What I’m against is the way being a mother and having 2.4 children is presented by many people, most in fact, as a moral duty and not to have children as a failure. Have you noticed how the mood changes at a social gathering when someone is asked about their children and they say they have none? It’s as if they’d said they have an incurable disease for which they should be pitied. And if they add that family life isn’t for them, it’s as if they’ve just declared they are a monster and an enemy. Until that moment, everyone is a liberal, is tolerant, believes in the difference of individuality. But as soon as the child-free declare themselves, the phalanx closes and the Falange is born. They go on as if motherhood and family life were fundamental virtues, greater than all other virtues. In fact, totalitarianism is nurtured in the self-righteousness of the family. And the world is being smothered to death by people. Even if we halved the world’s population right now, there’d still be too many for survival. And the total number increases by billions every year. So you could argue it’s a greater virtue nowadays to have no children than it is to have any.

  BOOK THREE

  The Orange Pillow Box

  1

  AFTER WILL WENT to college I was depressed for weeks. At first we emailed and called each other every day. But gradually his emails became shorter and his calls less frequent. When I pointed this out he said college work kept him so busy he had very little time to himself. I knew he was always totally occupied by what he was doing, to the extent that he was almost one-track minded. I knew that his work with trees and his music meant everything to him. I knew he attended to the next thing he had to do and to nothing else, which meant if you weren’t right there, he could forget about you till something reminded him. I knew all this, I loved his dedication, but I felt he was drifting away and soon I’d lose sight and sound of him altogether. And all the time I feared someone else, some attractive tree girl, would turn up and seduce him.

  I never knew till then how much I could miss someone. I read at that time, I don’t remember where, the sentence ‘Why is loss the measure of love?’ and knew that it was true.

  To make things worse, soon after Will left, Dad and Doris were married with only a handful of guests as witnesses at a registry office ceremony that I thought unimaginative and soulless. Legal bureaucracy pronounced as a religious service with a jobbing lawyer as priest and my father and my aunt (my dead mother’s sister) going through soap-opera motions and saying paltry words for no other purpose than to obtain a piece of paper that gave legal respectability to what they’d been doing for months, if not years. When I said this to them, Doris replied, ‘It makes us feel better and that’s all that matters.’ I didn’t want to argue. But is feeling better what matters in a wedding? Surely there should be a lot more to it than that?

  Ms Martin had already made me think more deeply about what I believed. She’d helped me to see how worn-out were the usual Christian practices, except perhaps for the few people who truly believed in them. Most people only went to church for baptisms and marriages and deaths because they needed a public demonstration of the high points of life. They didn’t believe in what was said and done. Ms Martin knew that from her years as a churchgoer; I’d heard about it from Will and his funeral stories. Not that I needed to be told; I’d seen it for myself. And it seemed to me as I watched Dad and Doris go through it that a registry office marriage was, as Granddad would have put it, neither nowt nor sommat – a piffling substitute, drained of life. I decided there and then that I would never accept such an empty ritual. If ever I got married the ceremony would have blood in it, have body and bone, a scrubbed fresh mind, a passionate soul, and express what I believed to be true.

  Two or three weeks after the wedding, Dad sold our house and we moved into Doris’s. Somehow the sale of Dad’s house and all of us living together in Doris’s changed my feelings about it. I no longer felt I belonged there. Or anywhere. It was as if I didn’t have a home any more, but was just a lodger. And as the days after the move went by, Doris and Dad increasingly lived a life of their own, going out together, entertaining their friends, going abroad. They had a new lease of life, were in love again and happier than I had ever seen them, which was good for them, but left me feeling out of it, and resentful.

  I tried to remain cheerful. I read a lot, spent hours playing the piano, worked hard at school, and tried not to show how unhappy I felt. But then came the blow that sent me spinning down into ugly depression. The loss of Izumi. For four years my best friend, my confidante, my secret sharer.

  She gave one goodbye party for her other ordinary friends and another for me only. We laughed too much and too loudly, we played silly games, we exchanged presents and wild promises that we would always be friends and always stay in touch and always write and always phone and always try to visit each other. We exaggerated our gaiety to mask our sadness.

  The night before she left, we slept together in my room. Not that we slept at all. We didn’t want to waste one second of our last hours together. With ritual care, we oiled and massaged each other, we sat in yoga position, gazing silently at each other while our favourite ancient Japanese music was playing. We recited our favourite poems to each other. I recited some I had written specially for the occasion and had copied into a little hand-made book as a going-away present. Izumi gave me a beautiful antique Japanese fan, symbol of a promise to return. We kissed and lay down, curled together, and murmured memories of our years as best friends. And I think we knew, though neither of us said so, that it was unlikely we would ever meet again. We knew intuitively that in the next few years we would change and develop in ways that would divide us, that we would grow up and become adults and lose the brio of our early youth, which we felt was already dying in us.

  Izumi said, quoting our favourite poet Izumi Shikibu,

  ‘The one close to me now,

  even my own body –


  these too

  will soon become clouds,

  floating in different directions.’

  And we wept, clinging to each other, and stroking each other, for comfort.

  In the weeks immediately after she left, I wept and mourned her loss. Now, when I think of her, I smile, sadly sometimes, but always gladly, always with gratitude. Dear dear Izumi! We loved and enjoyed each other, supported and encouraged each other, provoked and stimulated each other, in the uninhibited and unreserved way that secret-sharing friends can only in the uneasy, vulnerable, blossoming years of the early teens, when pimples mark faces and bodies change and reshape themselves for the adult life to come. I see now, as I prepare to give birth to my own child and to leave my youth behind, just how delicate and lovely we both were during those awkward, happy years. I see now that we thought only of what lay ahead of us, and believed everything was possible, even if not certain. We thought pleasure came from what was new, what was novel, what we had never done before. And that’s natural. But now I see, now I know that real pleasure, lasting and true pleasure, comes from what is familiar. Perhaps that is why the measure of love is loss. We love best what we know well of the other – the familiar body, the familiar mind, the familiar habits of those we love and who love us. To have that familiar being taken from us is to suffer the worst pain of life. I had lost my first lover, I had lost my best friend, I had lost my father and my aunt, I had lost my home. For a while I even felt I had lost myself. No one really knows what a storm is like till they are caught up in it and are tossed about by it.

  At a time like that, you need a helper and a safe haven. You can’t hack it on your own. My helper was Ms Martin and her house was my safe haven. I’d even say she saved my life.

  2

  One Saturday morning, early in October, when Dad and Doris were away for the weekend, I felt so low, so abandoned that I wanted to die. I’d have preferred death to the pain. I began to imagine how I might do it – how I might kill myself. I was appalled at myself for this, and frightened. Two years before, a girl in our school had killed herself because, she wrote in a note left for her parents, she couldn’t live with herself any more. I remembered the hurt, the guilt, the distress everyone felt, all of us at school. We felt we hadn’t done enough to help her. We felt this, even though we hadn’t known she was in such despair. I mean, we all feel we can’t bear to live with ourselves sometimes. But that doesn’t mean we do anything so awful about it. As for her parents, they will never get over the loss of their daughter. Her death ruined their lives. I didn’t want to hurt my father and Doris, or anyone else, as badly as that. But I was so desperate, I felt I couldn’t help myself. The urge to be free of the pain, to be nothing rather than suffer, was so strong that I reached a point when I knew if I did not do something now, right this minute, to stop myself, the impulse would become irresistible, and I really would kill myself. I could also still think straight enough – just – to know that I couldn’t stop myself on my own. I needed someone stronger than me, someone I would listen to. And I suppose, looking back on it, I wanted proof that someone cared, someone wanted me, after all, and would show that they did by stopping me from getting rid of myself. Calling a helpline such as the Samaritans wasn’t me at all. I didn’t want a disembodied voice or even the actual presence of a stranger. I’d feel humiliated. And feeling humiliated would only add to my pain and my determination to end it.