This Is All (27 page)

I stood up, cueing Will through our hands to stand up too, as I said, ‘If you don’t mind, I need a shower and want to change.’

No one replied.

Without a glance at Dad or Doris, I led Will to his car parked in front of the house.

‘Don’t say anything,’ I pleaded, ‘please don’t say
anything
! I’ll call you. No, you call me. No, I’ll call you. Oh, bollox, I don’t know.’

Will shut up my blether by putting his hand over my mouth, then took it away so that he could continue to shut me up with his lips.

When he’d finished, he said, ‘I don’t understand.’

‘I don’t myself,’ I said. ‘Later, okay?’

‘I’ll stay, if you want.’

‘What’re you going to do now?’

‘Stow the gear. Shower. Write up my notes. Print out the photos. Oboe practice. Check tomorrow night’s gig. Worry about you.’

‘A general statement would have sufficed,’ I said, trying to be funny in Will’s way.

‘The devil’s in the detail,’ he said.

Neither of us smiled.

I said, ‘I just need to be on my own for a bit.’

I say it just

Begins to live

That day.

I love the simplicity of it and the truth it expresses without any decoration or fuss. It’s like the distilled essence of a thought. Its simplicity is beautiful and graceful. It cannot be bettered. I wish I could write just one poem as good.

Ms M. loaned me her copy of Emily D.’s
Complete Poems
. It’s a fat paperback. ED wrote hundreds, none of them longer than a few stanzas. There are 1,775 in the book.

There’s an introduction, which tells that ED was an American who lived at Amherst, Massachusetts, USA, from 1830 to 1886. She had to look after her strict religious father and never married. But she wrote many love poems. Who was her lover? No one knows. Good on her!

From what I can see, she wrote most of her poems in a very short period of time. As if she’d turned on a tap and out they flowed full pelt. I think this is wonderful. But even more wonderful is that she went on writing even though no one would publish her poems. She sent them to some high and mighty old man who she thought was an expert. He told her they were not proper poems. Then four years after she died, he published them (and tampered with them to make them the way he thought they should be, the cheek!). But since then other people have published them the way ED wanted them. I am already fascinated by her and must find a biography that will tell me all about her.

I hope I have the same courage as she had to go on writing my mopes whether anyone likes them or not, and to write them the way I want them to be and not the way people say poetry should be. Today I came to the conclusion that there are no rules about writing poems.

I must study ED’s poems very carefully. So far, this is my favourite, mainly because it makes me think of Will and me.

‘Call my mobile. Whenever. Yes?’

‘Go. Before I change my mind. Go!
Go!
’

He kissed me goodbye.

I couldn’t bear to watch him drive away. I ran to my room and locked the door and threw myself onto my bed. I felt lost. Abandoned. And had made it worse by sending Will away, as if I was suffering a hurt I wanted to feel as painfully as I could on my own and wanted it to be as bad as it could be. Not that I understood what this hurt was. But whatever it was it seemed to well up from the pit of my stomach, in fact from my womb, causing an earthquake inside me. It made me tremble and found its way out in gasps and gulps and tears and howls which I tried to smother with a pillow. Panic took hold. I felt that if I let myself go, gave in to it, I’d completely lose control.

I would have phoned Izumi and talked it through with her, but she was away with her family on a sightseeing holiday in Sweden. I couldn’t trust myself to anyone else when feeling so raw. Except Doris. And this time, I couldn’t talk to her.

Quite without meaning to, I kept thinking of the horse, the white horse galloping over the downs yet never moving, like in a dream you see yourself running, feel yourself running, but are stuck to the spot. I remembered sitting with Dad above the horse’s head, remembered scattering Mother’s ashes over its eye. And its eye grew bigger and bigger and swallowed me.

Afraid I’d freeze up if I remained on my bed, paralysed by panic, I made myself stand up. Made myself walk round my room. As I passed them, I fingered my possessions as if trying to stay in touch with some solid part of myself.

Then suddenly my clothes were unbearable. Were contaminated. I tore them off. But then saw myself stark naked in the mirror and couldn’t bear to look. I’d have stripped my skin off if I could. I pulled on a favourite nightie, but this only made me feel more vulnerable. I searched my clothes for something I could wear, but nothing was right, nothing

Wild Nights – Wild Nights!

Were I with thee

Wild Nights should be

Our luxury!

Futile – the Winds –

To a Heart in port –

Done with the Compass –

Done with the Chart!

Rowing in Eden –

Ah, the Sea!

Might I but moor – Tonight –

In Thee!

(NB. Ms M. is always criticising me for using too many exclamation marks. I shall take pleasure in pointing out to her how often ED uses them!)

Some things I detest

Bermuda shorts and long floppy shorts, especially on obese oldies. No: on
anybody
. They make obese people look ugly and piggy, and make everybody else look stupid and silly.

Men with hairy backs.

Beards.
All
beards. Too disgusting for words.

Wearing sweaty clothes, especially undies, when I’ve cooled off and can’t change, as at school after hectic breaktimes or forced physical activity.

Ageing so-called pop stars, like hideous Mick Jagger and C. Richard. The walking talking grinning (and I’d say caterwauling but that’s an insult to cats) dead.

People who make sport into an essential moral virtue – i.e., you’re good if you do it and adore it and you are deficient if

seemed to be me or mine, everything was alien. I was alien to myself. I saw the words I’d stuck inside so many of my things during my naming craze; now that seemed so foolish, so stupid, so childish, so naff. I began to rip them off, scattering them around my feet. Like soiled snowflakes. Shredded pages. But soon gave up. It only made me feel worse.

A few weeks before, during the worst time of the exams, I’d filched one of Will’s T-shirts and a pair of his underpants from the laundry basket in his bathroom. I’d wanted some things of his, some things he’d recently worn next to his skin and were still heady with his most intimate smell. I’d used them to comfort me when I was on my own, especially in the night when I was awake with exam worry. Now I took them from their hiding place in an old pillowcase at the back of a drawer, buried my face in them and inhaled Will again like an anaesthetic.

After a while that wasn’t enough. I wanted them on me, wanted them next to my skin, wanted to be in them. In his clothes with him. I’d never worn them before, had wanted to preserve his smell uncontaminated by mine. But now I just had to put them on, which I did with a deliberate kind of reverence, as if they were vestments. They were loose, of course, they swaddled me, even his underpants were at least two sizes too big. But I liked that. I was lost in him. I wished I had a pair of his jeans so that I could wrap all of my body in him. But the best I could do was pull on the trousers of the tracksuit I wore for our morning run, after which we often made love. At least I knew Will’s hands had been inside them. His hands, his hands! I made myself think of his hands, made myself see them clearly in my mind’s eye, feel them on my body, because his hands, like his kisses, could always banish my worries and calm me. Had he been with me, he’d have caressed me, stroked me, soothed away this unfamiliar peculiar pain that had put me into such a panic.

*

you don’t do it and hate it. (The people involved with the Olympic games are
the worst
.)

Dogs that bark aggressively at me when I am passing by. I do not blame the dogs, I blame their owners, who have no thought for others. In my opinion, they should be fined for not training their dogs properly and be sent to Dog Owners’ Training Courses until they and their dogs have learned how to behave.

String vests.
Ugly ugly ugly
.

Dad’s feet. (They have white nails because they suffer from some sort of fungus.)

Polyester sheets.

Anything acrylic.

Dandruff.
Chunder chunder
.

Anything to do with hospitals.

Lavender tops as worn by old women. Even worse when they also have blue-rinse hair in artificial curls built up from their heads but so thin their skulls show through.

Public loos.

Traffic jams.

The muzak they play in lifts and public buildings.

Cigarettes in cars. Cigarettes anywhere, but
especially
in cars.

Halitosis (and o lordy I hope I don’t have it or don’t know I have it).

Emily Dickinson again

It’s very odd, how she uses dashes in nearly all her poems. I haven’t come across any other poet who uses them like this. Why does she do it? Is it to help you when reading, or is it just a peculiar kind of punctuation? It makes the poem look strange. The dashes catch your eye. They give her poems a certain
look
. And as I think the shape of a poem is as important as anything else about it, I’m sure the dashes are there to

The next thing I remember is Doris knocking at my door.

‘Cordelia?’

‘Go away!’

‘Let me in.’

‘No!’

‘We need a kaffeeklatsch.’

‘Nothing to say.’

‘But I have. Let me in.’

‘No.’

‘Please.’

Little C wanted to keep her out, wanted to throw things at the door, wanted to scream and shout and stamp, wanted to climb out of the window and run away. But Big C knew I’d have to give in in the end. Big C won. (‘I hate you, I hate you!’ Little C yelled at Big C. ‘You’re so
flaky!
’)

I unlocked the door, scrambled back onto the bed, and curled up in the foetal position, head tucked in so that I couldn’t see and couldn’t be seen. Doris shut the door with excessive care, stood for a moment, no doubt assessing the scene, then sat in the armchair that used to be Mother’s, which I’d placed by the window. My favourite place to read and to spy what was going on in the street below. That Doris chose to sit there irritated me all the more.

A game of chicken ensued. Who’d break the silence first? I don’t like to think of myself as competitive. But women are with each other, whether we like to think so or not. Especially when we’re jealous or feel betrayed. Isn’t that so? I think we must be biologically engineered to behave that way, like so much else that controls our feelings. On this occasion I felt betrayed. But I hadn’t yet worked out why, so my rational override couldn’t function.

What would we be, if we had no feelings? Unfeeling machines. Cruel automata. What would we be without our rational minds? Beasts of the field. Stupefied animals. What would we be without memory? Mad.

give her poems the
look
ED wanted. And maybe they are like the beat of a drum in music – they mark out the rhythm and the pulse of the music.

I’ve just said ‘Wild Nights’ out loud, almost as if it were a song, trying to be guided by the dashes. They do give the poem a special life of its own. And they do something to the meaning, but I’m not quite sure what. ED’s poems are like the kind of music that sounds both easy and difficult at first but if you listen to it again and again you hear much more going on than you heard at first and you begin to
feel
the sense of it.

As I wrote the poem out, it occurred to me that this could be a spiritual poem, as well as a poem about passionate human love. The loved one could be ED’s god and she could be talking about her soul and the journey of her soul on the sea of the spirit until it is ‘moored’ in ‘Thee’ – her god. I like this idea very much, because it makes the poem say two truthful things, not just one. But I have to admit I prefer to think of it at the moment as a human love-sex poem. And I do not think anyone could have written it who had not experienced such a love. Which, in my humble opinion, means that ED
must
have had a hot hot hot
passionate
lover. And I do hope very much for her sake that she had. (I love it when Will is
really
hot.)

Past v. Future

When the past is vivid in your memory it blots out the vision of your future.

I wonder if that is why their past is so vivid to old people and why they think about it and talk about it so much? The memory of their past blots out the only vision the future holds for them, which is their death.

Where ignorance is bliss, it’s folly to be wise.

Wrong.

Ignorance is always stupid, and it’s folly to be unwise.

Never one to hang about, Doris spoke first.

‘We thought you’d be pleased.’

Worms squirmed in my mind.

‘We thought you’d understand.’

Bile soured my tummy.

‘Well, I’m not,’ I said. ‘And I don’t.’

‘Look – I’m sorry. We got it wrong.’

Why at such times is an apology as annoying as stubborn intransigence? Or was it, this time, just a case of teenage angst?

I uncurled, pushed myself up, battered a pillow into shape behind my head and sat back, still unable to look Doris in the face.