This Is All

by Aidan Chambers

  Then it was the weekend. On Saturday morning I went home, did my laundry, collected things I wanted and returned to Julie’s. Dad and Doris were tolerant but their disapproval leaked through. There was no news of Cal. Dad said he could tell the police had lost interest. I didn’t say I was glad, because I didn’t want another lecture on the subject of crime and punishment and the danger I’d been in and how could I be so irresponsible as to want to let Cal get off scot-free.

  I got up late on Sunday morning. Julie was busy cooking in the kitchen, not her usual Sunday activity. She said it was something special, she’d explain later, why didn’t I get myself ready for a bike ride, it being a lovely crisp day? I showered and dressed. While I was in my bedroom I heard the front door, but no voices. Then a moment later the front door again and silence. Being in the back bedroom I couldn’t see what was going on in the street.

  I went downstairs.

  Will was standing in the middle of the front room alone.

  >> Book 5, The Yellow Pillow Box >>

  Writing

  I write to read the life I cannot live otherwise. See Consciousness.

  X Factor

  The X Factor is something I have not got. At least, not in the ways I’d like to have it. (Another example of the rule that what you want you don’t have and what you don’t want you have.)

  For example, when I was eleven there was a girl in my form called Frances Delaney. She had big ears and long thin brown hair, so she didn’t have the x factor in the beauty department. At least, not until we were asked to perform a scene from a play by our would-be dramatist English teacher. We were allotted parts, Frances Delaney was given a role we regarded as rubbish, but when it came to acting the play, she performed with such style that everyone thought she was brilliant and I remember envying her to the point of disintegration. As I watched her from the wings, I thought, I absolutely know I will never ever perform in public as well as that ever, and she can do it when she’s only eleven. I might have hated her, there were some of us who did, but as far as I was concerned Frances Delaney had the x factor. After that, big ears and thin brown hair didn’t matter, she was beautiful. Just because she’d performed so well.

  Then there was Pelianda Zarola (I mean, with a name like that …). When we were fifteen, we all had to be in the Christmas concert organised by our would-be impresario music teacher. Pelianda was in Year 12. She sang the last song with the rest of us younger ones as a backing group. The song was (hold your breath) ‘Edelweiss’ from The Sound of Music (I know, I know!). But the thing is, she sang it with so much of the x factor that I cried. Honestly, I blubbed. I find it hard to believe but I did. I mean ‘Edelweiss’! But you see: the effect of the x factor. Pelianda was also very good at art and later had an illicit affair with the art teacher, which was supposed to be a total secret so of course everyone knew. There was no doubt that Pelianda just oozed the sexual x factor. Listening to her sing and watching her at work on the art teacher demonstrated to me that she had what I did not.

  The x factor bothers me sometimes. People should be careful what they say about it. A man friend of Dad’s once said to him about me and in my hearing, ‘She’ll never pull the boys.’ And I believed it until Will, who changed my mind at least where he was concerned. I’ve been to parties where girls who I thought were quite ugly, but had blonde hair and could strut their stuff when dancing, attracted the most delicious boys. They were girls who appeared to have made no effort with their appearance (though in fact I now know they probably took a great deal of trouble making themselves look as if they’d taken no trouble at all). Whereas I used to take a lot of trouble to make the trouble I’d taken show, but it didn’t do the job. Because I didn’t have the x factor.

  So either:

  (a) you have the x factor absolutely and in all departments and everybody knows it (as some film stars have it, for example), or

  (b) you don’t have the x factor at all ever, or

  (c) you have it in some things but not in others and those things make you have it once they are recognized, or

  (d) you have it for the one person who, it turns out, is the only one you want but you didn’t know you have it till he or she came along.

  It seems I’m a (d) person, which I have decided is quite good enough and better than being a (b) person, thank you.

  Yearning

  I was going to write about this subject under the title Longing but changed my mind for two reasons.

  The first is that there’s enough under L and I don’t have much else to say under Y.

  But there’s a better reason. Which is that there are lots of meanings of the word ‘long’ but only one meaning of the word ‘yearn’.

  Not that to long for something is exactly the same as to yearn for it. To long is to have a prolonged unsatisfied desire. To yearn is to have an intense desire or longing. Yearning is more than longing. Yearning includes longing; longing doesn’t include yearning.

  I’m not saying it’s essential to yearn for something. That’s not why I’m including it in my alphabet of essentials. I’m including it because it seems to me, from my own experience and from observing other people, that yearning is an inevitable part of life. We all long for things, and these longings become so intense from time to time that they are yearnings.

  For as long (!) as I can remember I’ve had a longing (!) for something. For a while I longed to the point of yearning to be a top notch piano player. Then Doris took me to a concert to see a very great pianist and I realised I would never be that good and the longing died that very evening. The night I looked at my dark reflection in the window of the bus and it came to me that all I really wanted to do was write poetry, I yearned – longed intensely – for days afterwards to be a poet. This yearning has now settled into a constant longing, which I know will remain all my life, even when I consider I have become a poet, because I’m sure I’ll then long to be a better poet.

  There was a patch when I was about thirteen when I longed for God (it never became a yearning). I longed to be loved by God, to be talked to by God, and especially to be singled out by God. But then Granddad Kenn died and for some reason I decided at his funeral that whatever the truth is about God or no-God, I didn’t know it, and that as God, if there was a God, was God of everybody, there was no way that God was going to talk to me or that I could be special to God. So this particular longing went to the grave with Granddad – or rather went up in smoke with him, because he was cremated.

  This longing was very soon replaced by another, a longing to be loved for myself by someone else and to be loved only by him. Then I fell in love with Will, and lost him. And that’s when I suffered the yearning that was the most intense I have so far experienced, a yearning so intense it incapacitated me for days and depressed me for weeks. This truly was yearning. How did it manifest itself? By not allowing me to think of anything else but only of Will. I sat in my room and thought, What is he doing now? What is he saying now? Who is he with now? And more importantly, What is he thinking now? What is he feeling now? Does he like me or doesn’t he? Does he love me or doesn’t he? Will he come back to me? On and on, hour after hour, as if the repeat button had been switched on in my mind. And the thing that made it worst was that however much I thought about it, I couldn’t answer my desperate questions. I would try to imagine Will saying, ‘Yes, I do love you but I’m in a muddle about myself. Yes, I will come back to you but I don’t know how to do it.’ This would work for about five minutes and I’d feel better. But then I’d admit to myself that they weren’t really Will’s answers, I was making them up, and the yearning would start up again more painfully than ever. I’ve never been any good at fantasising and believing manufactured dreams. I’m too aware of life as it is.

  Though having said that, it is also true that I’ve never been satisfied with everyday life. I’ve always wanted more. Which I now believe is the cause of my perpetual longing. In the last year or two, particularly since Julie has taught me how to medita
te and I’ve practised it as well as I can, I’ve realised that there are two threads to my constant longing, like a double helix. They are a longing to love and a longing to understand. I discovered with Will that if I love a man and am loved by a man I am happy and can deal with anything. But I also have to understand what is happening to me. It was losing Will that made me perceive this truth about myself most clearly.

  So now I’m glad I long for things, and yearn for the things that matter most to me, because this directs my thinking, and helps me to focus on what I need to understand about myself. In this sense, longing and yearning are essential to me and to my life.

  Zygote

  The cell resulting from the union of an ovum and a spermatozoon. That is, the moment of your conception.

  1 To save you looking it up: as defined by the poet, Mr T. S. Eliot: ‘objective correlative: a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which are the formula of that particular emotion’. The objects, etc., evoke the emotion. My room evokes my life, and tidying it evokes my feelings about sorting out my messy life.

  BOOK FIVE

  The Yellow Pillow Box

  Scene One

  Reconciling

  THE SIGHT OF Will standing alone in the middle of Julie’s front room stopped me dead. I think I couldn’t believe that he was really there. But in that spelled moment the shock of seeing him breached a dam that was holding back a store of anger and without meaning to I surged at him and hit him across the face with the flat of my hand so hard his head jerked to one side, his glasses went flying, he stumbled back, tripped, and fell into the armchair by the window. Had he not, I’d have gone on hitting him.

  ‘Hell, Leah!’ Will said when he could speak, his hand against the burning side of his face, the other side pasty-green. ‘What was that for?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, still flooded with rage. ‘Everything!’

  ‘Then I wish I’d done nothing,’ he said, hitched himself up and combed his fingers through his hair.

  I foraged his glasses from behind the sofa – thank goodness they weren’t broken – and said as I handed them to him, ‘Why are you here?’

  ‘After that welcome, I wish I wasn’t.’

  A bubble of laughter burst out of me at the sight of him spread-eagled in the chair.

  He inspected his glasses for damage, put them on and queried me with his eyes, the seduction of which I avoided by turning away and perching on the sofa.

  ‘Arry,’ he said.

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘He told me what happened.’

  ‘He shouldn’t have. Where’s Julie?’

  ‘She’ll come back when we phone her. She’s left us some food.’

  ‘So this is a plot. You cooked it up with Arry and Julie.’

  ‘If you like.’

  ‘I don’t like it one bit.’

  ‘I wanted to see you alone.’

  ‘Well, you’ve seen me. I’m not much to look at and I’m scared to go out on my own and I feel like shit but I’m still in one piece.’

  ‘And I want to say something to you.’

  ‘I can’t think what. You made it pretty clear in your letter you never wanted to speak to me ever again.’

  ‘Is that why you’re so angry?’

  ‘I didn’t know I was till I saw you. And I don’t know why … Yes I do. Because you went away and left me. I missed you more than I knew it was possible. Which is why Edward happened … And because you wouldn’t forgive me for my mistake … You’re so hard, Will, so hard on yourself and so hard on others … And now Cal … And everything.’

  The anger was draining away as I talked.

  I said, ‘I’m sorry I hit you.’

  ‘Expect I deserve it.’

  ‘No one deserves to be hit.’

  Julie’s icon was on the wall. I fixed my eyes on it and while taking steady controlled breaths named silently to myself its woods and colours. Apple, ash, birch, holly, oak; red, green, orange, brown, yellow, violet, blue.

  After a few minutes Will said, ‘Can I sit beside you?’

  I managed a smile. ‘I’d rather you didn’t. I might want to hit you again, so we’re both safer where you are.’

  ‘In that case,’ he said, ‘I’ll stand up, because it feels wrong to say it sitting here.’ He got up. ‘Or no, on second thoughts what I want to say requires abasement, so to the basement I’ll go.’

  He knelt down in the middle of the room, squatted back on his haunches, clasped his hands in his lap, took a deep breath, looked at me with puckered brow, and said, ‘Cordelia.’

  ‘Will.’

  ‘The embarrassing thing is, I’ve been a fool.’

  ‘Join the club. I’m beginning to think it includes the entire human race.’

  ‘I really didn’t want to see you ever again. Couldn’t bear what you’d done. I thought we were special.’

  ‘But now?’

  ‘I still think we’re different in many ways. We don’t like what most people like, we don’t go much on socialising, we’re not big on family stuff, we’re loners. We like silence. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But we are no different from anybody else in our weaknesses and the things that hurt us. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.’

  It was hard not to laugh. Not at what he was saying but the way he was saying it. Will always has this effect on me. The more serious he is, the more I want to laugh. He’s the only person I’ve ever known who can deliver a lecture on one of his favourite topics – e.g. trees, ecology, music, the idiocy of our rulers – and at the same time be impatient with words and try to avoid using them. When he’s holding forth, you can’t help feeling he’s saying to himself, ‘Why the hell am I going on like this? What’s the point? Who cares what I think? Why don’t I just shut up?’ And that day his word-avoiding et ceteras finally did break me up.

  He gave me a puzzled look and said, ‘Why are you laughing?’

  ‘Nothing! Nothing.’

  ‘Because it’s taken me so long to work this out for myself? I expect you got there months ago?’

  I put on a serious mask. ‘It has occurred to me, yes. But that isn’t what you’ve come to tell me, is it?’

  ‘No no. I’m just trying to explain why I want to say what I want to say. Or rather I mean, how I got to the point of wanting to say what I want to say.’

  Another outbreak of laughter in the offing.

  ‘Well, good,’ I said, nodding vigorously as laughter-displacement activity. ‘So why not get to the point without more ado and we’ll talk about the reasons later?’

  ‘Right. Yes. Well. The thing is, Leah, the thing is, when I’d got over being angry with you and upset and hurt, because it really did hurt a lot the thing with … you know—’

  ‘Edward.’

  ‘Yes. I started to miss you, I mean miss you a lot. I have to admit I did try to forget you. There was a girl at college, not Hannah. I knew she fancied me and I quite fancied her. So we went out a couple of times. And we did go to bed, but it was no use, I couldn’t forget you and, she just wasn’t … you … If you see what I mean. I won’t go into details—’

  ‘O, do!’ I said quickly, greedy for every scrap, especially of comparisons in my favour. ‘If you feel it would help. Help me understand, I mean.’

  ‘No, it wouldn’t. [Damn!] I don’t want to upset you.’

  ‘It won’t. Who am I to criticise?’

  ‘Well, anyway, I got to thinking. About us. About us and other people. I told her I was sorry and ended it. And I missed you more and more. Then Arry came to live with you, which was good, because he kept me up with how you were and what you were doing.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You know he’s a friend. You knew that.’

  ‘But he told me he’d lost touch with you. That’s why he came to see me, to ask where you were.’

  Will smiled and pulled a face. ‘I wanted to know how you were and he needed an excuse to meet you to find out.’

  ‘Lordy! Just wait till
I see him.’

  ‘Leave him alone. He’s a good friend to you as well.’

  ‘But honestly.’

  ‘If we’re talking about honesty …’

  ‘All right, all right, Mr Integrity, get on with what you want to say.’

  I knew Arry had kept in touch, but intended to make the most of pretending to be annoyed.

  ‘Arry told me about you climbing the tree and I knew then you were missing me as much as I was missing you. Arry had said you were, but I didn’t want to believe him.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I’d have wanted to come back to you and I wasn’t ready yet. I still wanted to believe you were the one in the wrong, and I was right to break us up. Then he told me about Cal and I couldn’t stand the thought of you being so hurt. I was so angry I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to come back and find him and hurt him, really hurt him, wanted to murder him in fact. But slowly. And painfully. I thought of all the ways I could do it. And I wanted to be with you, to help you. And I wanted to know exactly what happened. I wanted to hear it from you. But I knew it was stupid, wanting to kill him. And I thought you had enough to cope with, without me making things worse. And Arry told me how everybody was doing their best to look after you. So I made myself stay away. It’s been the worst time in my whole life. Then yesterday Arry told me how low you were. He said he didn’t think you were recovering and he was afraid you might get worse the longer it went on. And I knew I had to come back, I couldn’t stay away any longer. I had to see you and tell you … what I’ve come to tell you.’

  He paused, looking at his hands, and my throat was so tight and my chest so tight I couldn’t say anything.

  ‘The fact is,’ Will went on, ‘I know the thing with Edward Malcolm wasn’t all your fault. It was mine as much as yours. Yes, I do think you made a mistake. But I’d made a mistake as well, but mine wasn’t so easy to see, at least not to me.’