The Kissing Game

by Aidan Chambers

  A nest of shelves I made of thrown-out storage boxes open at the front. I keep my books—sixteen of them—in one compartment, pans in another, personal bits and pieces in another, my crocks in another (thrown-out plates, soup bowl, mugs, glasses, knives, forks, spoons, cooking gear).

  A thrown-out wind-up radio.

  Ditto clock.

  Ditto some battery powered lamps. (It’s not easy to find thrown-out batteries that work, so I have to buy them.)

  An oil lamp (again, oil has to be bought).

  Candles (also bought, and as a last resort, though I do like the light they give, but it isn’t good to read by). Anyway, I tend to go to bed when it’s dark and get up with the sun.

  You’ll probably say that there is a danger of causing a fire that could burn down not only my hut but also set fire to the wood. I can only reply that I am very careful, and have bought a fire extinguisher, just in case.

  What haven’t I mentioned that you want to know about?

  Oh yes, the lav. I used to go in the wood, but it’s a bit of a palaver and you don’t want to use the same place every time. I dug a pit once for regular use, but it soon starts to smell and you need disinfectant, which makes it smell even worse. So now I have a chemical toilet I was given as payment by a man who was refurbishing his camper. I did a bit of work for him, lifting and carrying. (He was going to throw it out, so it wasn’t much of a payment so far as he was concerned.) I empty it once a week. This is the worst job and I’m trying to think of how to make it easier.

  You asked me why I’m living in my hut.

  There are two reasons.

  First, because I’m fed up with the human race and the way it goes on. Wars, money money money, rat race jobs, mortgages, celebrity crap, dodgy politicians, and half the world or more starving while the other half or less (us) throw out enough stuff to make life OK for the starving half.

  The second reason is I don’t want to do anything. They say you have to do something with your life.

  They mean busy busy busy. Ambition. Getting rich. Having families. Doing doing doing.

  But why?

  What makes it better doing things than doing nothing?

  If people want to do do do, I don’t mind.

  Though I do mind about a lot of what they do, because I think it is wrong.

  So why should anybody care that I am doing nothing? I’m not bothering them. I’m not asking them for anything. I don’t steal from them. I don’t con them out of money or goods. I don’t interfere with their lives in any way. I only take what they have thrown out. And I make use of it.

  What’s wrong with that?

  In fact, isn’t it good?

  You ask what I do all day.

  I listen to the wind in the trees.

  I listen to the birds singing.

  I watch the animals that come by my hut. You’d be surprised how many there are.

  I cook my food and enjoy eating it in my hut or outside, where I’m making a little garden to grow things. I have lettuce growing there already and potatoes and I’ve planted a few cabbages. I have plans for more. I get the plants from the garden centre when they throw them out because they aren’t selling or are a bit off. I lose some, but if you care for them properly it’s surprising how many pick up and grow well.

  I listen to the radio for music and news, and I like the plays they put on sometimes.

  And I am learning new skills all the time: How to make things. How to take care of myself and my environment.

  What I am learning most about is myself. It is not as easy to live on your own as people might think it is.

  I am learning to be independent and to stand on my own two feet, without sponging off anyone.

  Of course, I would like to live with someone who would like to live the way I do.

  I have faith this will happen.

  Sometimes people say that I have double standards. Even that I am a hypocrite, because I use things other people have made.

  But the stuff has been made, there’s nothing I can do about that. And it has been thrown out, so I’m making use of it when it would only add to the mountain of so-called rubbish we bury and burn and throw into the sea every day.

  You could say my occupation is recycling rubbish.

  And I know from the labels that a lot of the stuff is made in places like China where the workers are virtually slaves. That is wrong also.

  I read a lot. Books are thrown away all the time, so there’s plenty to choose from.

  And I have a ticket for the local library, which is one of my best possessions. I can read there in comfort. I can use the Internet (it’s there, so why not?). The staff are brilliant. They help me get the books I want.

  I’m studying the history and ecology of our country, and am learning the names and types of every tree and flower, every bush and plant in the wood.

  What am I doing?

  I am living. That’s what I’m doing.

  I am happy living as I live.

  But you have sent me this letter that says you are going to throw me out of my hut because it doesn’t have planning permission.

  And that you are going to pull my hut down—and throw it away as well, I suppose.

  Why do you want to do that?

  Just because some impersonal law says so?

  Or because you don’t like the way I live?

  Why are you doing this?

  That is what I’d like to know.

  I am appealing to you, and to whoever gives you your orders, to let me stay where I am, doing nothing that bothers anybody and doing no harm.

  Please leave me alone.

  Please let me live my life in the way I want to.

  From the Environmental Services Officer

  Request refused on legal grounds.

  It’s called Happy Moscow.

  It’s a Russian novel by someone called Andrey Platanov.

  The stuff about him at the back of the book says he died in 1951.

  This is not my kind of book usually. Russian books have all those unsayable names in them. I tried a book that’s supposed to be a Big Best Classic. It was called The Brothers Karamazov.

  No way. Couldn’t do with it, Big Best Classic or not.

  But you know how it is with friends.

  You have to go along with them when they are keen about something.

  And my friend Pauline was mad about this book Happy Moscow, so naturally I read it.

  It starts with the girl called Moscow.

  Reminds me of people like the Beckhams who call their children by the names of the places where they were conceived.

  Just as well none of them was conceived in places like Pity Me, where my grandmother lived. (Hello, Pity Me, how you doing?) Or Dripping Springs, Texas. (Hi, Dripping Springs. Nice weather today.) Mind you, there was a girl in my infant school called Cherry Orchard. Can you imagine? Parents!

  But back to Moscow.

  She lived at the time of the Russian Revolution.

  I had to look that up on Google. 1917 apparently. (I’m rubbish at history as well as at Russian names in books.)

  Anyway, the point is, I learned a new word from Moscow’s book.

  Toskà.

  I like learning interesting new words, don’t you?

  Toskà is a good one.

  At the beginning of Moscow’s book it says (I quote):

  ‘No single word in English renders all the shades of toskà. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning.

  In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody or something specific, nostalgia, lovesickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.’

  It says this is what a writer called Vladimir Nabokov says toskà means.

  I don’t know why Moscow couldn’t have said that herself.

  We
ll, no, I do. I’m like that with essays for school. I can always find what I want to say said better by someone else. And it is easier to write down what they say than try to say it all again in my own words, which are never as good. But I am always being told off for doing this. ‘I want it in your own words,’ they say. They being teachers of course. Ridiculous.

  Anyhow, back to Moscow’s quote.

  Nearly all of this is how I feel right now.

  Not bored.

  But aching somewhere deep inside. Would that be in my soul? I have not considered my soul so far. Whether I have one or not. Or, rather, what I mean is, whether there is such a thing as a soul. Whether anyone has one.

  Still, I do have an ache deep inside me, a pining, a vague restless yearning.

  But for what?

  Well, to start with for Henry James Benson.

  I have indicated to this member of the male sex as best I can without giving myself away completely what I feel about him. But no response. So far.

  I suppose I could go as far as to say I am lovesick for him.

  But apart from Henry James Benson, I do have to admit that there are times, quite often these days, when I suffer from a vague restlessness, when I wander about the house wanting something but not knowing what it is I want.

  Growing pains, is what my grandfather calls this.

  Teenage angst is what my father calls it.

  Normal is what my mother calls it.

  All of them say I will grow out of it, get over it, finito, done and dusted when I ‘grow up’.

  I detest the words ‘grow up’.

  ‘Why don’t you grow up!’ one or all of the aforementioned relatives snap at me when I am in my worst state of anguish, longing, pining, yearning, restlessness—see above.

  Well, excuse me!

  Now I have a word for it.

  Now I can say, ‘Oh, it’s only my toskà on the go.

  Just live with it. I have to.’

  Mind you, I also have to admit, that there is something enjoyable about being toskà.

  Toskà can be a painful pleasure.

  And to go by Happy Moscow and the bits of The

  Brothers Karamazov I managed to read before dying of boredom, not to mention a couple of Russian short stories by someone called Chekhov that our teacher read to us, I would hazard a guess that being in a major state of toskà and enjoying it for all it’s worth is pretty much the way all Russians are.

  Though one ought not to make generalisations of this kind and be so judgemental.

  So I’m told.

  But to continue:

  The storyteller of Happy Moscow says the name Moscow means ‘honest’.

  In the first chapter Moscow writes (I quote):

  ‘Story by a girl with no Father or Mother about her Future Life: We are being taught to have minds, but minds are in heads, there is nothing on the outside. We must labour to live truthfully, I want to live the future life, I want there to be biscuits and jam and sweets and always to be able to walk by the trees in the fields. Otherwise I won’t live, I won’t feel like it. I want to live normally with happiness. There’s nothing to say in addition.’

  Already I feel Moscow is my friend. I have a mother and a father and sometimes wish I hadn’t. (Not really. Only when I’m in a really bad toskà.)

  And Moscow wants what I want.

  To live normally and with happiness.

  And like her, my aim is always to be honest.

  With myself anyway.

  And with other people as much as I can, however hard it is to be honest with them sometimes.

  I want never to pretend or to lie about myself and about what happens and what I do—and don’t do (which is sometimes as hard as doing something).

  I do not want to pretend that what happens to me is anything else but what it is—what it feels like and what I think about it.

  I want this, however much it may make me suffer from toskà.

  Because it is impossible to translate toskà by one or two or even three English words, and because what it means is so deep and important in my own life, and I think in everyone’s life, I shall use toskà whenever I mean all those things that the writer Nabokov says it means in Russian.

  Toskà. Welcome to the English language.

  And because we do not have those accent marks above letters in English I shall write it like this: toska.

  I feel much better for having a name for what I feel right now.

  Or rather, what I was feeling just now.

  I feel better for having the name, the way you feel better when you are ill and you don’t know why, and

  the doctor tells you the name for what is the matter with you.

  Once you know the name of your ailment it seems to have no power over you any more.

  Instead, you have power over it.

  And power over yourself.

  So thank you, Moscow the honest.

  And thank you, Russia, for your Russian name for what I was feeling.

  And a happy toskà to you, one and all.

  The end.

  park bench eating a cheeseburger in the afternoon sun.

  Eve: Something keeps bothering me.

  Brad: There’s always something bothering you. I’ve never known anybody so bothered.

  Eve: How many people do you know?

  Brad: Never counted them.

  Eve: Not much to go on, then.

  Brad: No, I’ll give you that.

  Eve: Well, anyway, something keeps bothering me.

  Brad: What?

  Eve: That I haven’t done nothing yet.

  Brad: Nothing like what?

  Eve: Like life.

  Brad: Like how like life?

  Eve: Nothing like serious.

  Brad: Serious? Serious like what?

  Eve: Like something important.

  Brad: You mean, I’m not important to you?

  Eve: No. I mean yes, you are. But serious like in serious.

  Brad: Serious like in serious how?

  Eve: Like I mean serious like I haven’t never really suffered or gone hungry or been really ill or been really really hurt.

  Brad: It can be arranged.

  Eve: Haven’t really had any life.

  Brad: What sort of life?

  Eve: Like people you see on telly always with love troubles. Or like in wars or big disasters, like that soon-army what drowned people, where was it, in those islands somewhere. Or even people we know.

  Brad: Like who?

  Eve: Like Sam Briggs.

  Brad: The boy that had the heart op and his mum died of a heart attack on the same day?

  Eve: Like him. When I think about him I feel about like two years old.

  Brad: Like a baby.

  Eve: Like innocent. Or like I haven’t been born yet. I don’t hardly know what life’s about yet, what it’s really like.

  Brad: Don’t complain.

  Eve: I’m not complaining.

  Brad: It could happen yet.

  Eve: I’m just describing.

  Brad: Matter of fact, there is something, now you mention it.

  Eve: Mention what?

  Brad: Like life you want to happen to you.

  Eve: So?

  Brad: Well, you remember Karen.

  Eve: In McDonald’s the other night?

  Brad: After Sex in the City. Her. Yes, her.

  Eve: What about her?

  Brad: She’s got herself knocked up.

  Eve: No!

  Brad: Yes.

  Eve: In the club?

  Brad: Pregnant.

  Eve: Well, she always was a bit of a tart.

  Brad: Wouldn’t say that.

  Eve: How d’you know?

  Brad: Saw her last night, didn’t I.

  Eve: I thought you was at the game?

  Brad: I was.

  Eve: And she was there?

  Brad: She comes sometimes.

  Eve: You never said.

  Brad: You didn’t ask.


  Eve: So did she tell you who?

  Brad: She did, yes.

  (Pause)

  Eve: Well, come on. Spit it out.

  Brad: You really want to know?

  Eve: Course I want to know, idiot!

  Brad: Me.

  Eve: You?

  Brad: Yeah.

  Eve: You!

  Brad: Bit of an accident really.

  Eve: Accident!

  Brad: Yeah.

  Eve: Accident!

  Brad: Didn’t mean to knock her up, did I!

  Eve: What was you doing with her at all?

  Brad: Well, like you said.

  Eve: Like I said what?

  Brad: That’s life.

  get inside.

  He’d be all right as soon as he was off the street.

  Luckily, there was a cafe right there with a few tables free.

  He made straight for the toilet where he locked himself in a cubicle and sat there till he’d calmed down. Then he washed his face in cold water and flicked his hair into shape—it was windy outside. He felt better, in control of himself, but was worried about going out onto the street in case he was attacked again.

  The café wasn’t busy, too early in the morning, between breakfast-time customers and mid-morning office workers and shoppers having their coffee break. He ordered a green tea, because that was his comfort drink at home when he felt upset, and a muffin because he felt he ought to order something more than a drink.

  He sat at a table by the window, thinking that if he looked out at the street while he drank his tea he’d be able to familiarise himself with it and feel more confident when he went outside again. It was the strangeness of places that brought on the panic. But he never knew which places or when.

  The winter day was damp and cold as well as windy. People hugged into their clothes and hurried past. He, a country boy, thought of them as cattle in a strop.

  A girl walked by, eighteen or nineteen perhaps, his own age. But not hurrying like everyone else, nor as huddled up. She was wearing a kind of duffle coat with the hood up, her hands in the pockets. She glanced into the shop and caught his eye. They exchanged that kind of brief but intense look strangers give each other when there’s an instant recognition or physical attraction or need.

  When she’d gone out of view he wondered what it was about her that had caught him. He felt it in the pit of his stomach and between his legs.