This Is All

by Aidan Chambers

  Lately, I’ve been feeling the need for more space. My room has too much in it, it feels stuffed full, and I dislike stuffed rooms quite as much as I dislike crowds. More, because I have to live in my room but don’t have to live in a crowd. I’m sure D&D would let me expand into another room, but that’s not what I want. What I’m beginning to want is a place of my own, a small flat or house like Julie’s that I can make my own – make all of it my ‘room’, my home, my objective correlative, the place that is me.

  This room is beginning to feel like a skin I need to slough, or a shell I need to get out of because it’s not big enough for my growing body. I think that’s why I’ve been spending more and more time at Julie’s. Not only because we’re friends, but because it’s not my place, not my home, but I feel safe with her and ‘at home’ with her while I grow a new skin or build a new shell.

  But what I’m really saying is a place of my own is essential to me, and always will be.

  Sex, Shakespeare, Silence

  All three are essential to my heart, all three are essential to my mind, and all three are essential to my soul.

  Teachers

  I used to long for a good teacher just as I used to long for a true lover. And I’ve come to think, after finding the best possible teacher in Julie, that the two are combined. I’ve had so many naff teachers. Since I started school I’ve gone into every new lesson ready to learn, wanting to learn (even physics and chemistry, my worst subjects), and waited. Just waited. And nothing has happened. I mean, the teacher has taught, notes have been taken, homework has been done, files and exercise books have been filled with diagrams and notes and equations and quotations and facts and figures and questions asked and answers given, but for most of the time nothing has seemed remotely important. I’ve even enjoyed it. But though I’ve been taught, I haven’t learned much. Not, I’m sure, because I’m stupid. I’ve understood the information, been able to do the exercises, done well in tests, been praised in end-of-term reports: ‘Cordelia works conscientiously and is a pleasure to have in the class’, ‘Cordelia is cooperative and a good student’, ‘Another satisfactory term’s work in what is not her strongest subject, but she has tried hard and done her best.’ But still, nothing has happened. Inside me, I mean. I’ve done what was required and then quickly forgotten most of it.

  There was one teacher in my primary school who was good, Mr Yolland – Yolly to us. He was the most formal teacher I’ve ever had. He wore old-fashioned suits, glared at us with big milk-blue eyes that bulged, had a head that was too big for his body with a hair line that had receded so far it reached the back of his neck. He was probably born before the dinosaurs, and was sometimes quite terrifying. I don’t know why, I don’t know what it was about him, but when he taught us maths, I was thrilled. One day after we’d done an end-of-year exam, he beckoned me over and pointed his big hairy finger that looked like an ancient worm at the top of my exam paper, and I saw it said 99%. The thrill! I knew he wasn’t meant to show me this. To have done so well and to be shown my mark secretly and to see the pleasure on Yolly’s face increased my own pleasure to the point of ecstasy. But my next maths teacher was called Mrs Douglas – Daffy to us. She was the dullest, wettest specimen on earth and a hopeless teacher. She bored us so completely that we didn’t even have the energy to misbehave. My performance in maths went from 99% to 45% in one term. I was angry with her. It was as if she had taken something from me – the thrill of numbering, the clarity of equations, the amazing beauty of geometry, which Yolly had revealed to me. Whereas Daffy Douglas made mush of the entire business.

  Then there was (is) Julie. It’s thinking about her and what she means to me that’s helped me understand what a good teacher is. She knows her subject inside out, she likes her pupils but doesn’t fawn on them or pander to them the way some teachers do who are desperate to be liked or are dissatisfied with their private lives, she knows what she wants to teach us each lesson, and she’s a bit weird, a bit off the wall – the best way I can explain it is to say she dances when she teaches, which is amusing and provides light relief from the daily round. I never feel she makes me work hard, but she does, and I remember what she’s taught.

  And I do love her. As a person, as herself and for what she stands for and how she lives. I have come to think that I have to love a teacher if I’m to learn from them. If I only like them – and of course, if I don’t like them – I soon forget what they’ve taught me. And that’s the key thing. I forget very easily, I seem to have a defective memory (unlike Will, who never seems to forget anything). Maybe that’s one reason why writing is so important to me. (All writing is memory.) But if I love someone I don’t forget. It also has to do with the ‘feel’ of a subject. Yolly made maths feel interesting, I could feel there was a whole complicated wonderful world to be explored and lived in. And Julie makes language and literature, our English language and literature, feel the most important thing in the whole of life. That and our human spirituality, which for her is bound up with language and literature.

  I realise now that what I seek in a lover is what I seek in a teacher. A lover has to be superior to me in some way. I liked it, for instance, that Will was better than me at music. I liked the way he waited for me to get the notes right. I adored it that he loved trees while I knew nothing about them. I could have taught him a thing or two about English lit. I was superior to him in this respect. And that is necessary too. With Julie, I feel superior to her in many practical matters – the computer, for example, and cooking, and she likes to learn from me about those things. And Will, like Julie with Eng. lit., made the things he knew about almost mystically exciting. I felt as if he had access to a world which I could not enter, though he could take me with him if I wanted him to. I cannot love and I cannot learn from someone who I think is my inferior, as I felt Daffy Douglas was, even though I was only thirteen and she was on the flabby side of middle age. It’s no good being polite about such matters, it is how it is. I have to admire a person before I can love them and learn from them.

  I could never marry someone from whom I couldn’t learn a great deal, or who could learn nothing from me. I think your lover should also be your best teacher. (Which is why, I suppose, teachers and their pupils sometimes fall in love and commit one of the great sins of modern times, though as far as I can gather it was regarded as normal in some societies, such as among the ancient Greeks.)

  Learning, it seems to me, is one of the most erotic things in life. And the most erotic of all is secret learning. (I have to admit, I’ve felt this sometimes with Julie when she’s teaching me about meditation.) That doesn’t mean you end up having sex. Not at all. It means that you feel the excitement about what you’re learning that you also feel with sex. Not an orgasmic yell and ejaculatory whoosh, but a kind of simmering erotic pleasure.

  However, I’m learning something else about learning. I’m learning it from writing my pillow book and from getting as far as I have, because of Julie, with Eng. lit. As with many other aspects of life, in the end you’re on your own. Other people can only do so much for you and go so far with you. Beyond that point, you have to learn on your own. And for me, that means I have to keep writing it down, so that I know what I’ve learned by reading it, and so that I don’t forget it.

  Truth

  ‘I’m glad you love me,’ I force myself to say to Cal, ‘and I wish—’

  ‘No, chick!’ Cal shouts, holding his hand palm out to stop me.

  ‘I wish I could help you—’

  ‘No!’

  ‘– the way you want—’

  ‘Shut it!’

  ‘– but I can’t.’

  ‘I said—’

  ‘The truth is—’

  ‘Truth? Truth!’

  ‘I don’t love you.’

  ‘Shut it! I told you. Shut the fuck up!’

  ‘I mean, I like you—’

  ‘Shut the fuck up!’

  ‘But I don’t want to have sex with you.’

&n
bsp; ‘You do!’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘You bloody do! You’re gagging for it.’

  ‘I’ve nothing against you. It’s just—’

  ‘I thought you was different. But you’re not. Women. All the same. Teasers. Bloody cock teasers.’

  ‘I’m not! I am not! All women are not the same. And I’m not teasing you, I’m not, I’m not! Please, just leave me alone.’

  ‘It’s all right for you. Everybody likes you. Everybody wants you. Clever. Do what you want. Have what you want. Anything. All your fucking life. Anything. Everything. But me? Me? Nothing. Just shit.’

  He’s stotting about, an angry dance, wanting to grab me, hit me, force me, but holding himself back, which is taking all his effort, all his will power. His face is tomato red, his hands are chopping and slicing the air, pulling at his hair, rubbing his face.

  Calm him, calm him, you must calm him.

  ‘Look,’ I say as steadily as I can, but my voice is trembling with the rest of me. ‘I know you’ve had a hard life. And I’m sorry. I’ll help you, any way I can. I’d like to.’

  ‘O yes? Help me? How?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘See!’

  ‘Help you find somewhere to live. Find a better job.’

  ‘You don’t know nothing. You haven’t a clue. You think I haven’t had places? You think I haven’t tried for a better job? You think I haven’t had girlfriends? And what happens? Every time. They find out and they don’t want me. I do something they don’t like, and I’m out. You can change that? You’ll have me to live with you, like Arry? Yeah? Nar! Never. You can’t do nothing for me I haven’t done for myself. Except one thing.’

  ‘What?’ But I know the answer.

  ‘Love me like I love you.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I can’t just switch love on. Nobody can. It happens or it doesn’t.’

  ‘You could if you wanted. That’s all it is. That’s all it takes. Wanting to. You think I don’t know that? You’re telling me the truth? All right, tell me the truth about that.’

  ‘I can’t love you. Not the way you want. I can’t give myself to you. I just can’t.’

  He stares at me. His eyes are hard fierce stones.

  His fury subsides. He gathers himself. And from being hot and fiery and agitated, he turns cold and icy and still.

  ‘You can. Yeah, you can.’

  Suddenly, I’m more afraid than at any time since he captured me. I slump onto the edge of the bed. I’m sweating and feel the sweat chilly on me.

  ‘I want you,’ Cal says. ‘I want you like nobody ever. And there’s a way. I know a way I can have you and nobody else can. Never.’

  ‘What? What are you talking about? How?’

  ‘Die.’

  ‘What!’

  ‘Die. Together. Both of us. Tied up. While I’m fucking you.’

  ‘O god, no!’

  ‘Leave this shit-hole of a life while we’re fucking. I’ve thought about it. I’ve thought about it a lot. I know how to do it. A tart showed me how to get more pleasure when you’re fucking by being strangled. You have to be careful. You have to stop the strangling before you snuff it. It’s easy. But we won’t stop. I’ll rope us together when I’m inside you and I’ll fuck you and I’ll fix it so we both die while we’re doing it. Die together. Die when we come. While we’re coming. Then I’ve got you for ever. Great, eh?’

  ‘You believe you’ll have me for ever? You believe there’s a life after this one?’

  ‘Nar.’

  ‘What, then?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘So why kill us? How can you have me for ever if there’s nothing after this?’

  ‘Better to have nothing dead than nothing alive. And you never know. Do you? And if there is, you’ll be with me.’

  He’s smiling a happy proud smile.

  I’m shaking, desperate, lost for words.

  ‘I’ll get ready,’ he says.

  He might be talking about a childhood game.

  He clears away the remains of his meal and dumps them in a bucket by the door. He takes the duvet from the bed, folds it and places it on the table. He picks up his clothes, then mine, holds them up for me to see, says, ‘Won’t need these no more,’ and drops them into the bucket. He’s like someone preparing for his day’s work. Calm, unhurried, familiar.

  He picks up the rope and coils it.

  >> Violence >>

  University (?)

  Should I or should I not go to university? The bothersome question of what to do after I leave school, when I don’t know what I want to do with my life, except something no one wants to pay me to do, i.e. write poetry. I’m not one of those people who feel they have a vocation to be a doctor or a teacher or a sports manager, or who just knows they want to spend their life at a particular kind of work, like Will knows he’s an ecologist and a ‘tree man’.

  The question is urgent, because if I’m going to uni, I should apply pronto.

  Dad and Doris say it’s up to me, they’ll support me, whatever I decide. But I know they’d like me to go to uni because they think it’s educationally and socially useful. What they really mean is, you make friends and contacts at uni that are useful in your career and social advancement afterwards. That is, they are business people and snobs at heart. All right, I’m a snob as well, but I’m not a business person.

  So I have a kaffeeklatsch with Julie to try and decide.

  She begins, ‘If you go to uni, what would you study?’

  ‘Eng. lit., what else?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it’s the only thing I feel strongly enough about to spend three years studying. And it would help me with my poetry.’

  ‘Tell me what you think you’ll do, studying lit. at uni.’

  ‘Well, obviously, read a lot. Write essays. I know you have to do that. Maybe learn how to write poetry. Learn more about language. Learn about books, writers, the history of literature. Learn how to think more deeply than I do now about what I’ve read.’

  ‘What d’you mean by “read a lot”? Read a lot of what? Novels, for instance?’

  ‘And poetry and plays and what people have written about writers’ lives and about books and about the history of literature.’

  ‘And if I were to tell you it wouldn’t be like that, that you’d spend a lot more time on the theory of criticism than on reading the literature itself, what would you say?’

  ‘I’d say I’d not be quite so keen.’

  ‘And if I told you you don’t need to go to uni to study literature, that you could do better on your own – with a little help from a friend – what would you say then?’

  ‘I’d ask you to explain.’

  ‘You think studying lit. at uni will make you a better reader and a better poet? Is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘I think so, yes.’

  ‘Right. Here’s some names. Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Emily Brontë, George Eliot (otherwise known as Mary Ann Evans), Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, your beloved Japanese writers, the poet Izumi Shikibu and the pillow book author Sei Shōnagon. You’ve heard of them? Read some of them?’

  ‘Course.’

  ‘All great writers?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you know that none of them went to university?’

  ‘Well, I know Shakespeare didn’t, because you told us that the writers who were his rivals had been to university and were snide about him because he hadn’t and he was a better writer than they were.’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘And I guess none of the others went to university either?’

  ‘Correct. Most of them never even went to school.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Take Virginia Woolf, for example.’

  ‘Your favourite.’

  ‘She never went to school and never went to university, though of course – naturally, what else? – her brothers did. Yet she’s
one of the greatest English novelists, one of our greatest diarists and letter-writers, and what’s more, one of our greatest literary critics.’

  ‘So how did she do it?’

  ‘Well, for a start she was born into a very literary family. Her father supervised her studies. He also had a wonderful library so she was surrounded by the best of English lit. Everyone in the family read all the time. They used to sit and read their books together every day. And they talked about what they were reading and wrote about it in their diaries and in letters to their friends. Got it? Virginia didn’t need to go to university because living with her family was like being in a university seminar every day.’

  ‘But I don’t live in a family like that.’

  ‘No. But you’ve had a reasonably good education at school.’

  ‘But I’ve still got a lot to learn.’

  ‘True. But what you need to understand is that literature isn’t a science. And studying it isn’t like studying a science. To be a scientist, you have to go to university or at any rate to work with experienced scientists, to learn from them. Scientists need special places to do their work and to learn about their subject. But the university of literature is literature itself. Studying literature means reading it, and reading the people who’ve written well about it. The real teachers of literature are the writers of the books you read. Yes, you do need to talk about it, but you can do that with any thoughtful reader. So what I’m saying is, you already have all you need to study literature by yourself.’