This Is All (2 page)

I didn’t mind answering the call of Nature, how can you? In fact, I longed to answer it with a vigorous ‘Yes!’ I was looking forward to getting this seminal moment over and done with. But no chav-brained group of my girl peers and no lust-crazed member of my boy peers were going to decide where and with whom I entertained entrance of a rampant purple dragon through the intacta portals of my virgo.

Rampant purple dragon
. I checked the Net for all the names of the male member. Wouldn’t you guess! Men are so
obsessed with their penis they have at least 365 names for it. One for every day of the year. Here are a few of my favourites, not including the more disgusting examples:

Aaron’s Rod, Blind Bob, Captain Standish,

Diplomat, Dribble Dart, Flip Flop,

Giggle Stick, Holy Poker, Little Brother,

Jack-in-the-Box, Merrymaker, Piccolo,

Priapus, Red Cap, Ruffian, Third Leg,

Thumb of Love, Schlong, Short Arm,

Tailpipe, Unicorn, Wazoo, Yum Yum,

Zinger, Zubrick, and (very appropriate for Will’s willy-whacker, as you’ll soon learn) Pink Oboe.

And did you know that the word ‘pencil’ derives from the Latin word for ‘little penis’? Can’t help thinking of it every time I use one. A pencil, I mean.

Not being as obsessed with our pudenda we can’t match the men for the number of words for the vagina, but here are some:

The Vertical Smile (Spanish) and Yoni (Hindu) are my favourites.

Then, apart from the ancient and offensive Cunt, which has its origins fifteen hundred years ago in Old English, and the nasty Twat, an insult devised in the eighteenth century, we can offer:

Gates of Paradise, Bed of Heaven, Happyville, Love Lips, and such Americanisms (as we all know from
The Vagina Monologues
) as:

Pandora’s Box, Power Bundle, Pussycat, Powderbox,

Fannyboo, Tamale, Poopi, Nishi, Snorcher,

Mongo, Monkey Box, Poonani, Deedee,

Mushmellow, Goulie, Tottita, Mimi.

To continue
: Not being in love or fixed up with a regular boyfriend at the time, the only solution to my dilemma about selection of a sex-mate was to make a rational choice and arrange somehow for my deflowering to take place where
and when and with whom I wanted it to. And as I say, William Blacklin was the only boy who came anywhere near to fulfilling my requirements. But I wanted to be sure he had no idea what I was up to until I was ready to unveil the plot. I was scared that if he found out too early he’d shy away or frustrate my plans.

Because I had had only four boyfriends, none lasting more than eight weeks and none worthy of the gift of my virginity, my reputation among Will’s friends and playmates was that I was hard to get, snooty if not positively snotty, and therefore either frigid or lesbian. You will have noticed, I’m sure, my daughter, that this is how most teeny boys, not to mention legions of teeny men, generally comfort themselves when faced with a female who is picky about who she goes out with, is firm of will, won’t grant them their dickiest desires on demand, and – this above all – has the mental smarts to unwire their dinky brains. Not that I cared what they thought, not minding a jot about any of them. I thought of them as children with dirty fingernails.

But I was worried that my reputation might put William off. My only hope was somehow to snare him before he realised what was happening. He was nearly two years older than me. That was important. (I actually wished he were even older.) The boys in my own year and even in the year above might as well still have been in primary school they were so childish.

Will was in his last year of school, studying biology, chemistry and physics, the history of music and computer science. He was a good middle-distance runner but refused to take sport seriously, dismissing it as ‘the new opium of the people’. This endeared him to me as much as it disendeared him to the school’s sporty noggins.

Of medium height, half a head taller than me, his body was lithe and long-limbed. I liked to watch it in motion. And – isn’t it strange what attracts you to other people? – Will’s hard-work sweat had a sweet-and-sour spring-air tang quite
unlike the bouquet of other men I’d ever sniffed at. It turned me on like no human smell I’d ever nosed. (I’d found this out from close-quarter research during sports afternoons.) I always attempted to stand down wind of him. Even when past its wash-by date, his BO still pleased. Of how many people’s perspiration, even including your own, can you say that?

His hair, cut tantalisingly short, was jet black, his eyes dark hazel, his nose sharp, a bit beaky, and angled very slightly off centre to the left, his mouth medium-wide and full-lipped (I wanted to kiss it all the time), his hands long-fingered, slim, neat (I wanted to feel them all over me). He generally wore loose, out-of-mode clothes – he almost made a fetish of buying them from charity shops – with such comfortable lack of concern that he always looked more in-the-mode than anyone else. He was the sort who could have worn a tent and it would have looked like a Versace. I’m the sort who can make a Saint-Laurent look like a tent. (So why would he want me? I kept asking myself.)

He also wore glasses, as did I. (If you need them, flaunt them. We both scorned contact lenses as deceitful and a nuisance.) At the time, his were down-market versions of sixties-style, round, gold-rimmed granny specs; mine were severe, narrow, oblong-shaped, with minimalist black astrometal frames just then coming into fashion. Not only did he wear his when running a race, I have sometimes known him to wear them during sex. Which gave his face a surprised-owl look as he stretched every muscle for the finishing line, his provocative sweat flying. When I asked him why he did this, he replied that he never wanted to miss anything, and especially liked close-ups, for both of which he needed his specs.

He played the oboe; my delight was the piano. He was a member of the school orchestra; I kept my playing strictly secret, not wanting it to get mixed up with school stuff. He also had a band with some friends: lead guitar, bass guitar, drums, and Will on his oboe, which gave their music an airy
unusual quality, and singing. He had a gravelly yet light voice that made the soles of my feet tingle.

He didn’t regard reading a book just for the sake of it as nerdy; reading has always been one of my greatest passions.

As much as anything what mattered was that he made me laugh. Because he was gifted with a dry, oblique, deadpan sense of humour, before people got to know him they often wondered whether he was being funny or snide. This made many among the ancientry as well as his peers uneasy. Most of our teachers were wary of him. They weren’t quite sure whether he was winding them up or not. Intellectual cleverness is often distrusted by those who don’t possess it. Add ambiguity and you add fear. Will mixed both. But once you got to know him you learned that his humour was as conscious and intended as any can be. The trouble was, he didn’t make any concessions to people who hadn’t the wit to catch on. Not that he didn’t notice; he just didn’t care whether they caught on or not. The only way to take him therefore was straight and undiluted. And I liked that about him. It challenged me to be more than I thought I could be.

Finally in this list of qualifications, I chose Will because he wanted everything to be right. For him, good enough was never good enough, only perfect would do. Naturally, this meant he could be infuriating. The boys in his band sometimes fell out with him and left because he was never satisfied with their playing or his own. But they always came back because without him they did nothing and got nowhere.

His perfectionism also meant he frequently thought he was a failure, which in turn meant he was never completely happy. And this belief, this assumption, was Will’s biggest weakness. He sometimes needed reassurance, encouragement, solace, but would never ask for it or even show that he needed it. Of course, I didn’t know this about him at first. When I picked him out for my devirgining he seemed the most self-confident person I’d ever met.

… and Sex

If music be the food of love, as the great god Shakespeare says, and as William Blacklin likes music so much, then, me thought, I’ll capture my chosen one by feeding music to him.

But before I could feed him, I had to cook up a menu to entice him to the meal. A few minutes’ Netsearch turned up a neat little recipe for piano and oboe:
Three Romances
by Schumann. To be honest it was a grade or two beyond my capacity. But I thought this might be an advantage, because my poor playing compared with his would bolster his male pride. Besides, there wasn’t much to choose from, certainly not in my range of pianistic accomplishment, music for piano and oboe not being exactly thick on the ground, so this one would have to serve as bait with which to catch my Willy. And he took it.

Was I so calculating? Was I so embarrassingly brash? Was I so arrogant that I hadn’t one hint of doubt, one twinge of worry that well-favoured Will might find me less than his delight?

Well, I have horse’s-mouth evidence to help answer those questions. Here’s what I wrote in my pillow book the day I set my trap:

Just sent WB an em.

hi. i’m learning the piano part of schumann’s 3 romances, op 94, for piano and oboe, and need to try it with the oboe. any chance of trying it with you? cordelia kenn

Now I’ve sent it I feel even more like a nerk than when writing it. I mean, why should he care? Why should he bother? I know he knows who I am. But why should he take any
notice?
Am I out of my mind? Am I stupid? I look like nothing these days. No, not
nothing
. At least then I’d be invisible. Like – never mind! Like shit. I’m probably not his type
at all
. And even if he does say yes, which he
won’t
, just to be
helpful, just to be
nice
– how I detest being
niced
to – he’ll hate me when he finds out just how bad
bad
BAD totally hopeless I am and just how no way can I play the fugueing Schumann. I must have been bananas to send him that em. And now it’s too late. Sent. Gone. Delivered. And he’ll tell
everybody
and they’ll all laugh at me for being so gauche as to think even for one nanosecond that
he
, the coveted William Blacklin, would pick up such an obvious pass from
me
, the local dodo.

As for thinking I could get him to –
urrrrrrrrgggg
.

I hate myself. I loathe myself with the deepest direst loathing. I am in hell. I’m going to the garden to eat worms.

Lordy! He’s emmed back already!

ok ck. name day time place. c u. will b

It’s a YES! I don’t believe it!!!

will b, will b, will u b mine?

say yes, will b, and I will b thine!!!

As you see, I wasn’t so hot as a poet, then, except on the use of exclamations.

Searing rain

But now, my as yet unborn child, I’m tired. I ache with the swell of you. I shall explode. There are times during pregnancy when you feel like a hot-air balloon with a lead weight inside it. No hope of floating.

Anyway, I don’t like stories that go on and on in the same fashion page after page, with no variation, no changes of pace, of mind, of music, no pauses to catch my mental and emotional breath. I like stories that are like the English weather and the English landscape with its hills and wolds and valleys and plains and woods and forests and hedged fields and open moors and wide downs and mini-mountains and silent ponds and lonely lakes and trilling rills and
surging streams and curling rivers and haphazard skies and shifting reaches of the sea. A place where nothing is anything for long or is ever too much.

And you can be in love with a place, can’t you? Have you discovered that yet? Which is your place, I wonder, which is your land, your natural home? Even though I don’t feel I belong anywhere or that anywhere belongs to me, I do feel at peace in England and love it as nowhere else. This I’ve learned from trips to foreign lands, one benefit of having a father who is a travel agent.

(If you ask me where my own home is, the only answer I can give is that it’s not a place but words. I live in words and words are where I belong.)

It is night. Your father’s working away from home this week. A sweaty storm rampages outside. A few minutes ago there was an almighty crash of thunder and lightning, which made you jump inside me. I’m getting to know you by your shifts and shimmies. And at the moment you’re as edgy as I am. These days I cry about nothing. I saw an old man trip and fall down in the street today and I started to blub like a fountain. Couldn’t stop. Had to get in the car and drive away.

Tonight we feel alone, you and I.

We long for the touch of your father.

First date

Precisely at the appointed hour William Blacklin arrived, a little black oboe case tucked under his black-leathered arm.

I’d picked an evening when I was house-sitting for my Aunt Doris. She was away on one of her monthly jaunts to London’s theatreland, plays and music being her passions.

Doris
. I love Doris dearly. Since my mother’s death when I was five, she’s been my second mother. And she, unmarried
and childless, loves me as her surrogate daughter. At that time, when I was fifteen, I trusted her completely. She was the only one who knew everything about me that I knew about myself.

One of her biggest regrets is that she hadn’t the courage of her desire to be an actress, rather than training to be an accountant and spending the rest of her life as a well-paid calculator. All her father’s fault. He was opposed to any daughter of his going on the stage, an insecure and dissolute occupation according to him, though he was happy enough, in fact only too keen, to ogle any dishabille actress who turned up on the telly, preferably so dishabille she was stripped to the nethers. (As you’ll guess, I never liked him and didn’t cry when he died. Let’s not dwell on the other reasons why.) Always a good little girl, Doris was dutiful and foolish enough to listen and obey. She rebelled later, as Little Goody Two Shoes usually does. Seems to me, it’s never too good to be too good when you’re growing up. The longer you leave being bad, the harder you fall. I know what I’m talking about, as you’ll find out.