This Is All (33 page)

There are houses that are just other people’s houses, homes that are just other people’s homes. You have no strong feelings about them. Some feel unwelcoming even before you go inside, some are friendly, some are battered, some are elegant, some are untidy, some are too formal for comfort, some are over-heated, some are cold, some are ugly and malign and you can’t get out of them quickly enough. Some houses smell of food, some of dust, some of cats or dogs, some of damp, some of cooking, some are airy and bright with flowers, some are stuffy and full of old breath. The variations are endless. Ms Martin’s was – what? Attractive, yes. Spare to the point of Spartan. Very neat, very tidy, very clean. Small, like her (I was used to quite a bit more space so noticed the difference). Trim, like her. Full of books, like her. Mysterious too – that strange
thing
on the wall, what was it? – like her. And tranquil. And silent. Not dead silent, not just
no noise
, absence of sound (she didn’t even have music playing when I arrived or the radio on, as most people do), but a silence that somehow seemed alive. An active silence. (I couldn’t find the way to express it.) Which was a surprise, because at school she talked a lot and would often put on music for us while we worked. Till now, sitting in her garden, I wouldn’t have said she was a quiet person but that was how she was here at home. I could tell this was more
her
than the person she was at school. And I connected this at once with her mysteriousness. Suddenly, she wasn’t just my teacher, but was something else as well, which I couldn’t at that moment identify.

towards the back end of their bodies so that their babies are protected by the big back legs and the body of the mother while they are suckling underneath. Animals like gorillas and chimpanzees and humans that stand up and walk on two legs grow their breasts high up on their chests so that they can carry their young and feed them while standing, sitting or walking.

Human breasts grow before a woman needs them to give milk. This may seem odd until you remember that they have to do their sex job first, in order to attract a male to mate with, before they are needed for their mothering job.

Things that worry me

and sometimes even make me feel afraid

Not liking Will’s mother when I love Will.

Dad being lenient with me when he should be strict.

Trains with hooligans on them.

Hooligans anywhere.

Being in the middle of the row in a theatre or cinema or any big meeting place, because I can’t get out if I feel sick without making a spectacle of myself, and because when I am stuck in the middle of a row I
always
feel I am going to throw up over the person in front of me halfway through the play/concert/whatever.

Not being able to go to sleep when I know I have to get up early the next morning.

Dad dying. Doris dying. Ms M. dying.

Will dying. (This is the worst.)

My future and not knowing what it will be like.

The future in general.

War.

Refugee camps. Being in one.

Psychotherapists.

Anyone who wants to interfere with my head or my body.

Ms M. came back, carrying a tray with a packet of tissues, two glasses of water, a little box of what I assumed (wrongly) were playing cards, and a green glass bowl full of small objects of many shapes and sizes and colours. She placed the tray on the table, sat down, held out the tissues for me to take one, placed a glass of water in front of me, and sat back, waiting, till I’d blown my nose and taken a drink. She did all this without a word, as if performing a ritual.

When I’d steadied myself, she pointed to the box of cards and said, ‘Take one.’

I did, and turned it over.

Surprise. Not clubs or spades or diamonds or hearts, but a single word.
C A L M.

‘Show me,’ said Ms M., and smiled when she saw it.

‘Is this a game?’

‘Kind of. Shall I go on?’

I nodded. Why not, after all? It saved me from explanations and, probably, more tears.

‘Have a good look at the things in the bowl, feel them if you want to, and choose the one you like best.’

There were pebbles of many shapes, marbles, smooth slivers of different kinds of wood, beads both glass and metal, buttons, miniature fruits made of wool and of plastic.

I chose a glazed pottery egg, partly because I liked the weight of it – heavy for its size – and because it sat so neatly in my hand, but mainly because I liked the strange doodly pattern drawn on it in greys and washed-out blues and misty white.

I held it up between my finger and thumb for Ms M. to see.

She smiled again, thought for a moment, then got up and went inside again, taking the box of cards and bowl of objects with her.

I was intrigued, of course, and nervous. I took another drink of water, blew my nose properly and waited. It

Religious fanatics. Fundamentalists especially.

Fanatics of any kind.

Seeing people with anorexia.

Burglars in stockinged headgear. Waking up and seeing one standing beside my bed.

People I know when they are drunk.

Drunks – all of them.

Witchcraft or the idea that someone I think is ordinary is actually a witch underneath and can read my mind.

The thought that anyone might be able to read my mind.

Ecstasy (as in the drug, not as in Will).

Public transport at night when there are very few people around.

Being followed by someone I don’t know.

Football crowds.

Crowds.

A lot more things which I can’t be bothered to write out.

Worrying about all of the above and letting any of them frighten me.

Worry itself.

Silly sayings about eyes

(
as found in duff stories about love
)

She gave him the eye.

He was so surprised his eyes popped.

Her eyes danced with pleasure.

He pierced her with his eyes.

Her eyes spoke volumes.

His eyes were on fire.

Her heart was in her eyes.

He dropped his eyes.

Her eyes were glued to the television.

occurred to me that since arriving an hour or so before, I’d spent most of the time waiting for the next thing to happen, as if that was what this visit was about: waiting. But waiting for what?

Dusk had fallen. Under the tree, in deep shadow, I felt hidden and safe. The tops of the houses were silhouetted against the evening sky, an uninterrupted blue. There was no breeze. A lone bird sang its bedtime song from the top of one of the chimneys. A silent fleck zipped by and another – pipistrelles seeking breakfast.

Ms M. returned, this time bearing water in a yellow plastic basin, a green towel, and a little brown bottle that I knew must be massage oil.

She said, ‘I’m going to massage your feet. Is that all right?’

I nodded but was apprehensive.

‘Are you sure?’

I wasn’t, it seemed such a strange thing to do without any explanation and the first time I’d ever visited her. But also I felt a frizz of excitement and said, ‘I’m sure.’

She asked me to move my chair to the side of the table so that she could arrange herself in front of me with the basin on the ground between us; and sat with her skirt hitched up high and the towel over her lap.

She said, ‘Hold your egg in your hands. Rest them in your lap. Make yourself comfortable. Close your eyes. Try to think of nothing at all.’

I did as instructed.

Ms M. lifted my feet on to her lap, took off my shoes, placed my feet in the basin (the water was soothingly warm), and washed them, put them back on her lap, dried them gently with the towel, dressed her hands with oil, which I knew from the smell was geranium (a favourite of Izumi’s), and began.

And continued for I don’t know how long, except that it was almost dark when she finished. As she kneaded and stroked and flexed and caressed my toes and the soles of my

Rain

(
a Year 10 essay for Ms M
.)

I’ve just got back from a run in the rain. Rain is one among many things that make me feel different from most other people. Most people do not like rain. They complain about it constantly. Tv weather forecasters even make a moral system out of it. Sun good, rain bad. ‘There’s a threat of rain this morning,’ they say, ‘but the afternoon will be better and will brighten up. There’ll be a problem with heavy rain tomorrow and I’m afraid there’s no prospect of any improvement later in the week.’

Rain comes in many varieties. When I walked home from school today it was what my granddad always called ‘sea fret’.
¹
Very fine thin light drizzle. A refreshing gentle spray. Then it came on thicker. A showerhead on low pressure. Half a mile from home it was larger drops falling heavily, a watering can at full pour. Flatten-your-hair and running-down-your-nose rain. By the time I got back home it had almost dried up. No more than a misty veil of water.

Rain is the ocean falling from the sky. Clouds are rain asleep.

People’s complaints about rain go with their complaints about ‘English weather’. But to me, English weather is exactly the weather I like the most. I like it because it’s changeable, rarely being the same for more than a few days. It is just not true that it is always grey and damp. It is not true, as anti-rain people say, that it ‘rains all the time’. Far far from it. This can be proved statistically, but I will not bore you with figures.

It is only because of our weather’s changeability and only because of our many different kinds of rain that the English countryside is as green and beautiful and various as it is, that our gardens are as lovely as they are, that our trees thrive and our rivers flow. It is only because of our weather that our sky is a prairie grazed by herds of beautiful clouds of many shapes

feet I began to drift. Not into sleep or even a doze, but into a kind of limbo, a nowhere place. It was as if all the poison in my body was being drawn out of me by her firm and subtle hands. The upset, the anger, the tension, the awkwardness, the loss, were dispelled by Ms M.’s fingers.

It was not the same as being massaged by Izumi. By comparison, that was a simple matter – a soothing comfort provided by a friend. Nor was it like a professional. Doris had taken me a couple of times as a treat to her aromatherapist. That was pleasurable and relaxing but nothing else. This was much much more, something that went beyond friendly comfort and pleasant health care. This wasn’t about the massage itself, but about a different state of being that the massage allowed you to enter. At the time, I couldn’t tell what it was, only that it affected me deeply.

I said I drifted, but that isn’t right. It was more like levitating. Or gliding, perhaps. Or like those dreams in which you fly effortlessly and with silent excitement above the world, entirely weightless, free of all ties and entanglements, and at peace.

I wanted it to go on and on for ever.

When at last Ms M. stopped, my feet held still in her hands, neither of us moved.

After a while, I opened my eyes, and saw that Ms M. was sitting with her eyes closed, all of her quiet but in that alert way you know is not just resting, not
doing nothing
. I knew she was busy behind her eyes. But busy how, busy doing what? I longed to know but daren’t ask.

I gazed at her, willing her to remain exactly as she was. I’d never seen her like that before. It was very intimate, very private. I felt trusted. Honoured, even. And I knew as I watched her, knew as I inspected every part of her face, knew then that I loved her. And that I’d loved her ever since she first taught me. Not sexually, I don’t mean that. But loved her for what I sensed she was in herself. What she
meant
to herself.

and breeds. It is only because of our weather that we are a land, as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins says, of pied beauty, of dappled things, of skies of couple-colour, of things counter, fickle, freckled, with swift, slow, sweet, sour, adazzle, dim. Never boring, never dull, never endlessly the same. Come rain, come shine, come clouds, come open sky, come winter, spring, summer, autumn, come glorious English weather. Praise be!

I invite all those who complain about rain and English weather to relocate to the Kalahari or the Gobi or the Sahara or some other desert, where they can bask in uninterrupted sun for weeks, months, years at a time. But no complaints will be allowed when they have no water to grow food with or to drink or to wash or cook in. Nor will they be allowed to return to live in this green and pleasant land of refreshing sustaining creative rain.

[Ms Martin, Is it all right to use footnotes? I quite like them in books, do you? They add variety and are a good way of adding details without interrupting the main flow, though of

And what she meant to me. I wanted so much to know her better, to know her more. And I wanted so much to be like her. I’d begun by admiring her; now I wanted to emulate her.

As I was thinking this, she opened her eyes. I would have looked away, embarrassed at being caught staring and aware that my feelings must be written on my face. But her eyes kept hold of mine, and we remained eye-to-eye for an age. During that time I felt my whole being was x-rayed, that I’d been investigated to my roots, and that Ms M. knew more about me than I knew about myself. But though I was unsettled by this, as you are on the rare occasions when your real self is discovered, I wasn’t frightened or upset. I didn’t resent it. Not at all. I
wanted
Ms M. to know me. I was glad. I was so glad, I wanted to hug her. But I held back, afraid of appearing presumptuous. Which was, I now think, the most foolish thing I did that changeful day.

Ms Martin broke the spell by putting my feet down and folding the towel and saying, ‘It’s getting late.’

She stood up, poured the water from the basin onto the ground at the base of the tree.

I stuffed my feet into my shoes and followed her into the house.

She didn’t say anything, didn’t even pause as she set the basin down on the kitchen table and continued to the front door, which she opened wide for me to pass through without touching the paint.