This Is All (3 page)

From the time my mother died, I had a room of my own in Doris’s house – the house where both she and my mother were born and grew up – and often slept in it for a row of nights at a time. From my early teens, when she and Dad thought me responsible enough, I spent the night there when she was away, sometimes alone and sometimes with Izumi for company, we playing at being grown-up and independent.

It was Doris from whom I caught my devotion to the piano. A peach of a player herself, she was the proud owner of a white Bösendorfer baby grand, which lived in a music-only room painted a deep blue-green with white trim at the back of her house. We called it the music box. I first put my fingers to that magnificent instrument when I was seven, after which Doris taught me till I was eleven, when she decided I needed the detached discipline of a professional, a teacher I still see once a week.

*

Being the guardian of my secrets, confessor of my sins, best comforter in calamity, I had told Doris of my hankering for Will. But I hadn’t mentioned that my hankering was only for initiate sex. I hoped this could be taken as read. And it was Doris who suggested I use music as bait to entice him.

‘They used to say,’ Doris mused, ‘the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. I’ve never found that to be true. In my experience the way to a man’s heart – if he has one, which in many cases is doubtful – is via his dingus. But from what you tell me about the boy William, I’d say the way to his heart is through his head. If, that is,’ she added, smiling, ‘it’s his heart you’re after. And,’ she went on, not pausing for an answer, ‘I’d say what he needs in a girl is someone he can admire. Pretty girls, beautiful girls, certainly sexy girls, are ten a penny. Sounds to me like your William could take his choice. My guess is he’ll choose someone who inspires his respect. And a full frontal approach won’t work, Cordy love.’ (Doris is the only person I ever allow to call me Cordy, a diminutive I detest. Delia I don’t mind; but prefer to be called by my full name.) ‘Lure him with music. Hook him unawares. Play him into admiration. That’s my advice.’

So here we are, a few days later, William and myself, the two of us alone in the music box, setting up our scores and sussing out the interpersonal subtext.

‘Didn’t know you played,’ said Our Hero, wetting his reed with erotic succulence and eyeing the set-up.

‘Just for myself,’ said Our Heroine, with obnoxious modesty. ‘Don’t expect too much. Only a hobby really. Don’t want it to become a school thing.’

‘Bit of a hobby horse, then. Nice piano. And a room just for music. How tonic.’

I’d explained about Doris and the home-alone situation.

‘Should be the dining room, I suppose. But Doris prefers music.’

‘If music be the fruit of love,’ he said.

My heart missed a beat. Had he seen through my plot?

I said, fussing with my score to cover my panic, ‘Food, I think.’

‘Shakespeare?’

‘Who else?’

‘Most quotations seem to be.’

‘Or the Bible.’

‘Or pop songs.’

‘Want to make a start?’

We slaved at the notes for two hours.
Two hours!
And guess what – in all that time Will uttered not one word, shot not one glance, made not one slightest move that even hinted he was interested in anything but the music. I was not scoring with this score. If music be the food of love, all it seemed to do, as far as I could tell, was feed his desire for more of it.

‘Like a drink – or
anything?
’ I asked with hint-f emphasis at one moment when we stumbled over a phrase, hoping that during a fermata for refreshment he might move his eyes from the score on to me and I might modulate his mind into a sexier key, like, say, F-sharp. (Sorry! An unworthy pun. But I mean! – the Schumann pieces were called
Romances
. That’s one reason I picked them.) But no. ‘I’m okay if you are,’ said he, and took to tootling again.

His concentration was infuriating, his tenacity exhausting, his absorption in his playing – well, there’s the rub, you see.

When I told Izumi about it afterwards, she said, ‘Hito-o-norowara, ana-futatsu.’

‘O yes?’

‘Means: When you put curse on another, two graves will wait in cemetery.’

‘Well, thanks!’

But she just laughed in her Japanese way, hand over mouth, and said, ‘You set trap for him, and he trapped you. Isn’t that right?’

And it was. I can even tell you the moment it happened.

There we were, after two hours of
o-no!
and
no-no!
, getting on nicely-nicely-thank-you, when suddenly the clouds parted in the sky, the setting sun came swanning in through the french windows and picked out like a spotlight the thin length of Will, in his floppy white T-shirt and sloppy light-blue jeans, his music propped against a pile of books on top of the piano, his fine long fingers dancing a jig on the black rod of his oboe, his succulent lips embracing the reed, his cheeks forming peculiar curves and crevices as he puffed and sucked, his deep hazel eyes focused through his glasses intently on the score, the whole of him, body, mind and soul, totally absorbed, totally engaged, all of his self completely at one with what he was doing.
And:

He was so unbearably beautiful, so adorable, so completely himself, I couldn’t take my longing eyes off him and as a result lost my place, tripped over the keys, stumbled to a stop, and fell passionately in love.

Love me do

How scornful I’d always been of ‘soppy romance’, of saying it with flowers, of candlelit dinners, of whispered lovey-dove, of moonlight mush, of secret swapping of amorous tokens, of all things valentine.
She speaks, O speak again, bright angel!
All that Romeo and Juliet stuff. Yuk yuk, puke puke, excuse me while I slash my jeans with a Stanley knife. I knew girls were supposed to like it, but I didn’t. Or perhaps I only pretended that I didn’t. As a kind of protection? What you can’t have you pretend you don’t want. What you long for the most, you scorn the most.

But there I was, in a moment, in a flash, suffused with
symptoms of seduction: flushes of hot sweats, dizziness of the brain, yearnings of the lips, hastings of the heart, pricklings of the breasts, churnings in the belly, weakness in the knees, wobbles in the legs, tinglings in the inner thighs, liquid fire gorging my vag, heaving of sighs. And afterwards: sudden loss of appetite, inability to sleep or to concentrate on anything other than the object of desire, imagination breeding fantasies of what might be, could be, was wished for, and an insatiable need to wallow in the very poetry that had so far received only my disdain:
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? If thou must love me, let it be for naught Except for love’s sake only, My true love hath my heart and I have his, How I do love thee, Let me count the ways …

What’s more, I couldn’t keep news of my in-loveness to myself. I just
had
to tell someone. Not Doris. Not yet. I didn’t want adult advice, didn’t want help, especially didn’t want an I-told-you-so look in her eyes. There’s nothing more irritating than being told you’re doing precisely what you said you’d never do and were told you certainly would. Older people – relatives and friends at least – should have the decency to pretend they never ever thought such a thing.

I told Izumi. She was glad, as a best friend should be, and envious too, which pleased me. She was without a boyfriend at the time. She was generally agreed to be the most beautiful girl in our year. But she found most Western males too aggressive, too harsh and loud, too in-your-face, as, she said, Japanese women often do. Also she once told me it was not the boy but the love letters and little gifts and other such signs of passion that she really liked. It was love play that she wanted, not love itself. And you know how good most boys are at all that.

As a present for my fifteenth birthday Izumi had given me an English-language copy of one of her favourite books,
The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon
, written a thousand years ago by a Japanese woman in her early twenties who was a lady-in-waiting
at the court of the emperor’s first wife. Izumi explained that it’s one of the masterpieces of Japanese literature. We read many parts of it together, and soon it became one of my favourite books too. Sei Shōnagon seemed more alive to us, more ‘there’ than many of the people we met every day. This is sometimes the case with books, don’t you find? And it was because of Sei’s
Pillow Book
that I secretly started keeping my own.

Now, ten months later, when I told Izumi of my sudden hunger for love poetry, she told me about the poetry written by other young Japanese women who lived around the same time as Sei Shōnagon. And particularly about Izumi Shikibu, after whom my Izumi had been named by her mother because she was a big fan of the long-dead but still-alive poet. This poet Izumi had numerous hot affairs, two of them with sons of the emperor, the second of which, Prince Atsumichi, was the true love of her life. When he died she composed hundreds of poems mourning her departed lover, which I think must be some of the best poems of love and grief ever written.

All of Izumi Shikibu’s poems and of the other women’s are very short, what the Japanese call
tanka
. My Izumi could recite some of them by heart, in English translation as well as in Japanese, which she did that day she introduced them to me. After which I couldn’t wait to get my hands on them. A couple of days later she gave me a little Japanese notebook covered with traditional red ‘dragonfly’-patterned paper, into which she had copied in careful neat writing a selection of her own favourites. I treasure it, have added favourites of my own, and look forward to the day when the time has come to give it to you.

Here is the poem by Izumi Shikibu that first drew me.

Wishing to see him,

to be seen by him –

if only he

were the mirror

I face each morning.

It said exactly what I felt about Will. So short and simple, yet behind the simple words and between the few short lines there lies much more that cannot be said, or is best left unsaid. It was like a snapshot of my thoughts and like an x-ray of my feelings. It spoke of love without using any of the clapped-out over-cooked language I’d always sneered at. It and Izumi Shikibu’s other poems helped me see that in my own flush of love there was something wonderful and special to me that was not just a repeat performance of the same old experience everyone has had from the year dot.

Something else. I felt as I read that little poem again and again that the words were mine, that I had written them, that the poem belonged in some particular and exclusive way to me. This made me want to write more of my mopes. Gave me the confidence to do so. Showed me the way. Gave me a model, a pattern to work to – a recipe for a different kind of dish from any I had made before. Which I did during the next few weeks, one after another, pouring all my passion for William into them.

They make me smile with embarrassment now, some of them. And naturally, they’re mostly pale copies of the ones they were based on. But so what! As my English teacher, Ms Martin, told me, you have to start somehow, and how better than by imitating the best poems you can find? That’s the way you learn how to write. They helped me at the time, and I’m glad to have my first embarrassing mopes because they remind me more vividly than anything else of what I was and how I felt then. Better than photos or old clothes or school reports or mementos or souvenirs, however evocative these may be. I like poetry so much because for me it resurrects life and remakes the world.

*

Let’s have a fermata, a pause for a change of air. Here’s a passage of the kind I was writing in my pillow book around the time I fell for Will. (I’ll give us changes of air like this when I feel we need them as my story progresses.)

A-whoring

I don’t go a-whoring. But I might. One day, I might. One night. For the fun of it. The excitement. The risk. The danger. Just to try it. Just to see what it’s like.

But of course I won’t. Still. A-whoring. On the streets. At night. In the dark glow of back-street lights. On the corner. In a whore dress. Tight top. Short black-leather mini-skirt. Slinky broad-mesh black stockings. A wig of long blonde hair. Loads of make-up.

I’ll drawl to passing men, ‘Looking for business?’

They’ll ask, ‘How much? Have you somewhere to go?’

To go a-whoring.

Moonshine.

Where do such fantasies come from, such desires, such temptations? Is there an instinct in us all, everybody, us girls anyway, to go a-whoring?

And by whose lights a-whoring? Whose word a-whoring? A-hunting for a mate maybe. A vestigial urge of the virgin.

Or like the girl, young woman actually, in Bangkok I saw on tv the other night. A man, an Australian journalist with a camcorder taking time out from his job, picked her up in a whore-bar, but didn’t want her for sex (so he
said
) but because he liked the look of her and wanted to be with her and talk to her.

Of course he asked her why she went a-whoring, the way men do, as if they didn’t know and weren’t a-whoring themselves when they ask it. She said her family in the country was very poor and needed money to pay for their little house and bit of only-just-enough land to live on, so that house and
land could not be taken from them by a greedy landlord. She had come to the city, never having been before, an innocent virgin, to earn the money her family needed, and whoring was the only work she could find.

The Ozzy journalist befriended her, went with her to meet her family. And then said he would give her the money they needed (little enough by Ozzy-Western standards) if she would give up whoring and stay with her parents. She said she would. He gave her the money and went back to Oz.

But he couldn’t get her out of his mind. Was haunted by her. Believed he was in love with her. So he returned a year later. But she wasn’t with her family. She had gone back to Bangkok. He searched till he found her. She was working in a worse whorehouse than before. And when he asked her why she had gone a-whoring again, having promised that she wouldn’t, she said, ‘Because it is my fate.’