This Is All (14 page)

Three times a week we’d go running (he could be infuriatingly disciplined about homework and music practice and suchlike). My morning rituals (which if I’m honest were and still are as infuriatingly inviolable as his) require at least half an hour in the bathroom, pooing, showering, hair-tending, followed by at least half an hour in my room, dressing and, as Dad called it with deliberate intent to annoy, ‘titivating’. (He pretends to be chauvinist, but it’s a pretence about as convincing as a puppy dog playing Rottweiler.) Then breakfast, which took all of ten minutes as I never wanted more than a glass of orange juice, a slice of toast and marmalade, and a mug of tea. (I hate running on an empty stomach.)

On days when I didn’t run I did fifteen or twenty minutes of piano, which got my brain and body working again and made sure I got in some practice, in case there was no time later. The piano in my Dad-home room was an electronic keyboard, which I could play mute, listening on headphones, so as not to disturb the neighbours, i.e. Dad and any visiting
sleepers, Dad being even worse than me in the early morning. At Doris’s I played the Bösendorfer as fortissimo as I liked in the luxury of her music room.

Playing was ended by Will pulling up on his scooter at eight thirty on the dot. From the Monday after our reconciliation he picked me up every school day. By the end of the first week everyone had decided we were an item. There was teasing at first, naturally, and some surprise that I of all the possibilities was Will’s choice. I said nothing about
him
being
my
choice, but only smiled with what I hoped was Sphinxian inscrutability, or at the least like the cat who had got the cream. A few of the chavs went further than teasing, as you’d expect. You’ll know the kind of thing. Like holding a door open in the corridor and letting it swing back just at the precise moment when it would thump into my arm and send files and textbooks and bag and whatever tumbling to the floor, requiring that I grovel among the clod-bashing feet of the poltruding horde to retrieve my stuff, accompanied by the perpetrator’s exaggerated cries of apology and mock-shock-horror at my ‘accident’. There were also the usual worn-out remarks and tired jests of the jealous and bird-brained, which it would be boring to repeat for they’ll be tediously familiar to you.

I never told Will about this nor asked him whether he suffered boy-versions of such behaviour. Not just because this is the kind of thing we don’t tell the boys, but mainly because I was determined from the start not to allow school to intrude on our friendship. I wanted us to belong to a special separate world, and I wanted to insulate us from anything that might sully or wound or injure ‘my Will’. For quite soon I came to think of him as ‘mine’, and to fear that someone might take him from me.

My Will
. From the moment I fell in love with him, William Blacklin was to me the most beautiful human being imaginable. There were times when I would lie awake at
night angsting that an accident on his scooter – or later the car he was given when he was old enough – or some gross disease would disfigure him for life. This was an entirely selfish worry, I now understand. It was for myself that I didn’t want his beauty to be harmed. But perhaps first passionate young love is always selfish – perhaps all passionate love is, young or old? I wouldn’t know about the old kind yet. But this was a lesson I was to learn the hard way.

Phoning
. During the first four weeks of our friendship, we kept out of each other’s way in school, not even meeting up at break or lunch times. But during lunch time, we would phone each other or text, and decide whether or not we would meet straight after school or later, depending on homework, music lessons and practice, family arrangements, etc. At the weekends, he would call as usual in the early morning while we were both still half asleep, and on those days we would talk for ages, and gossip and discuss music and anything else of interest, and sometimes just lie there saying nothing, but listening to each other breathe, and end the call at last by arranging the rest of the day. They were often the nicest times, needing only Will lying beside me in the flesh to make them perfect.

Also regularly:

Running
. As I said Will made me run with him at least three times a week, either in the morning or during the weekend. I needed the exercise, he said, I wasn’t doing my health any good by missing out such an essential. On the first Saturday of our routine he turned up with a grey-blue tracksuit for me: a present bought from Oxfam. And though I thought it made me look like two sacks of potatoes tied in the middle, I wore it to please him.

Reading
. I made Will promise to read every book I asked him to read, a promise he made with good grace and a resigned shrug.

‘I am not,’ I told him, ‘putting up with a boyfriend who can’t talk to me about stuff I’ve read. And anyway, you’re not doing your mental health any good by missing out on such an essential.’

‘Quid pro quo,’ said Will.

‘QED,’ said I.

Music
. He set us another piece to practise together, Henri Dutilleux’s Sonata for piano and oboe. Very beautiful, very difficult. But Will never did like anything that was easy. If it isn’t difficult, he said, it isn’t worth doing. In that case, I said, I shall make myself as difficult as I possibly can. Which won’t be difficult for you, he replied.

Daydreaming
. At first I wanted to be with him all the time – so what’s new? – suffering agonies when we weren’t or couldn’t be. I sat through lessons unable to think about anything but him; and daydreamed about the things we might do together; endlessly doodling his name; composing love letters that I never sent because they were too embarrassing; making lists of every detail about him that I loved. Sitting next to me in class one day, Izumi wrote on my rough book, ‘Toritsukareta-mitai-ni, William-ga-suki. Means: Being haunted-as-if, William-love.’

Improvisation
. But soon I began to like it that each day was different, without a set pattern. Improvisation on a seven-bar theme. And admitted to myself that this was right for me. It suited my temperament. I’d observed how old couples seemed to like, even to need regular routines, the unvarying rituals of their daily lives. Perhaps this is something you do need when you’re old. I didn’t know, nor did I much care. Old was a time out of sight in the future; this was now. For me – and it’s still true – unvarying regularity would be death. Perhaps because after my mother died I never had the programmed life so many children grow up with. I lived with Dad or with Doris. Two different kinds of home, two different kinds of parent. My days were shaped and shifted by the
unpredictable requirements of their work and Dad’s latest female enthusiasm and Doris’s comings and goings, never quite feeling I belonged with either. I became accustomed, conditioned I suppose, to irregularity and unexpected changes, and to looking after myself. Though I did sometimes long ‘to be normal’, for settled stability and life in one home, and, most of all, a constant lover-friend. In fact, one of my favourite daydreams about Will and me was of us living together day and night on our own in some out-of-the-way place, preferably by the sea, never apart, always together, our lives fused and everything shared.

But whatever else happened during those first weeks, one routine was essential to Will and me. Every day without exception we always met somewhere private where we could consume each other with a harvest of kisses and soothe and excite each other with a repertoire of caresses, and hold each other so tight that if the laws of nature had allowed it our bodies would have melded into one. We touched and smelt and tasted and listened and gazed. I longed for this daily rehearsal of our senses from the moment I woke, and afterwards fed on it for the rest of the day, my body succulent with postprandial pleasure (and, need I add, craving for more), till I went to bed, where I relived it in memory and fell asleep to elaborate it in my dreams. We mapped each other’s body during these closeted times, discovered the places that we loved to visit and the fingering that pleased our desire.

But there were no-go areas, and we never went beyond delicious foreplay. Somehow we managed to draw back, hold off, stop ourselves before reaching the overwhelming point of no return that Will called ‘the ring of singularity’. Looking back, I don’t know how we achieved this feat, for by the end of each meeting we were hot and panting and urgent. But in those early days of our love this was not discussed. We acted
only on instinct, impulse, unspoken understanding. We had made an agreement not to go all the way till we were ‘ready’ and we stuck to it – whatever ready meant, which neither of us quite knew, believing that we would know it when the time came.

We kept this up for two months. By the end of that time I was beginning to fret. The pressure inside me was at bursting point. My sixteenth birthday was imminent and I was still a virgin, the loss of which condition being the purpose that had started all this, falling in love being an accident that had got in the way. My mind was distorted by desire, my concentration on anything else completely blown, my resistance all but broken.

Time to be decisive.
There is a tide in the affairs of [wo]men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune
. Time to make a move.

Kaffeeklatsch

‘Need a kaffeeklatsch,’ I said.

‘With kaffee or without?’ Doris said.

‘We still haven’t. What shall I do?’

‘Men!’

‘He’s a boy, not a man. Maybe that’s the problem?’

‘The child is father to the man.’

‘Can’t help wondering. What would Mum have said?’

‘Always a mistake to second-guess the dead. They can’t answer back if you get it wrong.’

‘So what do
you
say?’

‘As your aunt, I’d say one thing. As your all-but-in-fact mother, I’d say another. When you were just a child, it was easy. Well, easier. But now you’re not a child I’m never sure which role I’m playing. Or which I ought to play.’

‘As my all-but mother?’

‘As your all-but mother I’d say wait. Don’t rush at it. You’re still very young. You’ve plenty of time. Are you quite sure he’s the right boy?’

‘And as my aunt?’

‘Get on with it. Just be sure you’re protected. It’s not such a big deal. Certainly not worth all the hassle you’re giving yourselves. Your school work matters just as much, if not more.’

‘I want to. But he won’t. Doesn’t. Whatever. Wants everything to be. You know.
Right
.’

‘Have you spoken to your father?’

‘Are you joking!’

‘It’s my auntly duty to enquire. He
is
your father, after all.’

‘Can’t ask
him
.’

‘Why not?’

‘
Doris!
Because he
is
my father! Anyway, he’s too buzzed up with his new paramour. Probably needs a kaffeeklatsch more than I do.’

‘Don’t be too hard on him.’

‘On her, though. She gives me the heebies.’

‘So.’

‘So?’

‘Some things can only be worked out by yourself. Nothing anyone says is any real help.’

‘Thanks a lot.’

‘It’s called growing up.’

‘O lordy!’

‘Darling?’

‘Yes?’

‘Just get on with it.’

Woman

One of the things I like about being female is that I can switch about whenever I feel like it. I can wear a skirt today
and jeans tomorrow, and no one minds. Which man, barring those who wear kilts, can wear jeans one day and a skirt the next without opprobrious comment? I can walk along with my arm through Izumi’s or round her, and kiss her, and dance with her, and no one cares a toss. Try that, if you’re a man, with your best male friend. I can lash on the make-up or go around as unadorned as a filleted fish. I can wear psychedelic green or flaming crimson or whatever colour I fancy. Sexually I can come and come again and again and again for as long and as often as I like (well, potentially anyway – and with practice and a little bit of help from a friend, I agree). Which man can do that, I’d like to know?

I can do all this and much much more, which men cannot, because I’m a woman, the prototype, the first sex, the progenitor, the activator, the primary pattern. I’m the ancestral, the original, the aboriginal sex of which the male is merely a variant. And so I’m free to play as I wish, to try to be whatever I want to be, and discard each trial as I discard every month my unwanted and unused eggs.

Which is why, I suppose, men have so often tried to restrict and enslave us. Because they know the Bible and all such male testaments got it wrong. Adam did not come first. Lilith, the first woman, came first. She came, and spawned Adam in her orgiastic joy. Though, as science has proved, we females do not need to have an orgasm simply to beget a child.

Now we know for sure it isn’t god who reigns, but goddess. And we know as scientific fact, not as man-made myth, that women can do pretty well without men. Men exist because we, wishing it, allow them to exist. Scientifically speaking, we don’t need them any more. Some American macho male called Ernest Hemingway wrote a book called
Men Without Women
. What a toe-curling thought! A kind of hell, I should imagine. Not that I want a world of women without men. Not at all. A woman-only world would not, in my opinion, be more than a smidgeon better
than a man-only world. But nevertheless, it’s true that men cannot
be
and cannot
do
without us. Without us they are nix. Quite simply impossible.

Until men liberate themselves from the oppression they’ve made for themselves, until they free themselves from their confining taboos, their tongue-tied emotions, their blinkered eyes, their gummed-up ears, and their narrow-mindedness, they’ll remain impossible and fail themselves. There’s no place for men like that any longer.

But have courage, boys. Not all men are laddo-men, not all men are dodo-dildo-machos. There is hope. For where there’s a Will there’s a way.

Father’s day at the White Horse