This Is All (47 page)

I said, ‘Have you talked to your mother about it?’

‘Why should I?’

‘Just wondered. Wouldn’t want her to think I’d – you know – tried to make you do anything – stupid.’

‘It’s nothing to do with her.’

‘I know we can’t.’

‘No.’

‘But I wish we could.’

I saw him look at me askance.

He said very seriously, ‘One day. I know we will – live together I mean. One day.’

I hitched onto the bank. I didn’t want him to see the tears welling. He came up to me and hugged me from behind and kissed the top of my head.

‘We’ll phone and em,’ he said. ‘And I’ll be home for holidays. It won’t be too bad.’

her to go to university so that she would have a successful career and a better life. But when she was about sixteen something happened that turned her life upside down. One day, she was very upset, she didn’t tell me why, and went into her local church, St James’s, on her way home. She wasn’t religious. She regarded what her father called ‘all that church stuff’ as old-fashioned nonsense. So why she went into St James’s she didn’t know, except that she didn’t want to go home till she had calmed down and the church was a place where she could hide and be quiet.

She sat at the back. No one else was there except an old woman who was arranging flowers beside the altar. Ms M. watched her for a while, impressed by the care she was taking, the kind of care that people give to a labour of love. But Ms M. didn’t want the old woman to feel she was staring at her, so she picked up a Bible that was lying on the seat beside her, opened it at random, and read the first passage that met her eye.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God
.

As she read those words the book and everything around her suddenly seemed to glow. And she felt she was seeing colour for the first time in her life. Not just the colours of things, but
colour
itself, the very body of colour – the redness of red, the blueness of blue, the yellowness of yellow, the greenness of green, the deep white emptiness of black. It was as if colours were living things. And she saw that they gave life to everything else – to the ancient mellowed wood of the pews, to the grey stone of the pillars, to the bright sharp brass of the cross and the candlesticks on the altar. All were as alive because of their colours as the old woman arranging the flowers and as Ms Martin herself. What was even more astonishing to her was that she also felt the world – the entire universe – was as alive, as
conscious
, in its own way as she was in hers. She felt she was being ‘looked at’ by the

I wanted to trust him, wanted to believe it would be all right. But still I doubted.

I said, ‘I don’t know what I’d do if I lost you.’

He could hear the tears in my voice. He turned me to him and smoothed them away with a finger.

‘You won’t,’ he said.

He lifted my face to his and kissed me.

And when we were done, he said, ‘Come to the gig tonight. Go on piano for your songs.’

I shook my head. ‘I’d break up.’

‘Shall we make a disc for you? A memento.’

I nodded.

‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Let’s do something special tomorrow night.’ The night before he’d leave.

I stood back, holding his hands in mine and said, making myself smile and be light, ‘We’ll go for a posh meal. I’ll decide where and it’ll be my treat. And we’ll dress up.’

I wanted to be strong and romantic and not peevish.

‘Done,’ he said and laughed. ‘All right now?’

‘Fine.’

‘Good,’ he said, and laughed again.

If a boy, if a man, asks you if you’re all right and you say yes, he’ll always believe you and get on with what he wants to do. It’s just the way they’re made.

shards of his laughter

splinter my mind

cut to the bone

tears of blood

like evening dew

Will ran back to his band. I stayed by the river.

Up to that very day, if I’d been as upset as I was then, I’d have rushed home and hidden in my room. But now, within a few days, everything in my life that had seemed stable and certain

world and everything in it, just as she was ‘looking at’ the world.

She was so shocked by this ‘revelation’, as she called it, that she couldn’t move. But she remembered some lines of poetry by William Wordsworth, which she had learned by heart, ready for use in an exam.

… I have learned

To look on nature, not as in the hour

Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes

The still, sad music of humanity,

Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power

To chasten and subdue …

… Well pleased to recognize

In nature and the language of the sense

The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,

The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul

Of all my moral being.

She had wondered what those words really meant. She had understood them with her mind, but not emotionally, not in her heart.

She said the lines to herself again.

This time their meaning became clear with a sudden flash of understanding. The world, the universe, was alive. She was not only in it but
part of it
. She only knew this because she could
say it
to herself in words. And somehow, though she could not yet understand how, this
knowing
, this
consciousness
, was what people call God.

At the same time as she thought this she realized with equal clarity that she would never be the same again. Whatever had happened, whatever all this meant, she knew her life had changed in that brief moment for ever. She could not yet say exactly how, only that it had.

After a while, when the moment had passed and she could

and always
there
, everything that made me feel safe, was stable and safe no longer. Dad would not be the same Dad as he’d always been, Doris no longer the same Doris. I could no longer talk to either of them, no longer confide in them as I used to. They weren’t separate any more; they were together, more each other’s than mine. The house that had been my home since I was born would be sold. Just the thought of someone else living in it made me feel as if my home had already been taken from me. And Will, the person who had filled my thoughts every day, almost every minute for months, the person who stirred emotions and feelings I’d never felt before, the person who had kept me going and for whom I did everything, the person who had become the centre, the heart of my life, was going away. And even if I didn’t lose him, even if he stayed true to me and faithful and always came back to me, he would, I knew, be changed by his time away. And yes, I would be changed too by our separation. Separation for anything more than a few days always changes people and changes their relationship to each other. When they meet again there’s always a part of them that’s a stranger to the other. They have to rediscover each other, retune themselves, become accustomed to the stranger. I knew that, but I didn’t think Will had learnt it yet.

Everything that mattered to me was changing at the same time. Nothing would ever be quite the same again. And I didn’t know how to think about that. I wished I understood myself better – I still do! It seemed I could only understand my simplest thoughts and feelings, while there were all sorts of complicated thoughts and feelings deep inside that I couldn’t reach.

I thought of going to Ms M.’s. I wanted to talk to someone older and wiser, who would understand but wasn’t involved. I could think of no one else like that who I could appeal to right then. But I didn’t dare bother her again. So I stayed

move and breathe normally again, she got up and left the church, and saw, really
saw
, with a deep sensual thrill that sparkled through her body, that the colours of everything outside were as full-fleshed and as alive as they had been in the church during the brief magical time she came to think of as her godspell.

For a few days after that she tried to behave as if nothing had happened. Her godspell had been exciting, but she didn’t trust it. She’d heard about such things in religious studies classes. The teacher called them ‘epiphany experiences’ and said they were fairly common during adolescence. Ms M. had decided they were nothing more than hallucinations, the brain reacting to various stimuli – stress or drugs or whatever. A kind of dream, maybe. She was too embarrassed by it to tell anybody she’d had one.

But the hallucination (or whatever it was) didn’t pass. A week, two weeks later the colour of colours still impressed her and everything in the world was still aware of her. She also found herself stopping outside St James’s on her way from school and wanting to go inside again. At first she told herself this was silly and teased herself by thinking, You’re only after another spiritual buzz. But one day she couldn’t resist.

This time the only other person inside was the vicar, the Reverend Philip Ruscombe. She knew his name from the board outside the church, where there was also a tatty poster that said, ‘Jesus is the Breath of Life’, under which some wag had scrawled, ‘And he has hellitosis.’ The vicar was sitting in his pew in the chancel, staring straight ahead as stone-still as a statue. She supposed he must be praying. She’d seen him around, a rather seedy-looking, balding, rotund, late middle-aged man, always dressed in a grubby cassock, but had never spoken to him. He was usually accompanied by an ancient black labrador that trailed wearily after him, moulting on the lean earth as it limped along. It was sprawled at his feet,

where I was, sitting under our kissing tree and watching the river as it flowed past my feet.

I thought how lovely and how strange a river is. A river is a river, always there, and yet the water flowing in it is never the same water and is never still. It’s always changing and is always on the move. And over time the river itself changes too. It widens and deepens as it rubs and scours, gnaws and kneads, eats and bores its way through the land. Even the greatest rivers – the Nile and the Ganges, the Yangtze and the Mississippi, the Amazon and the great grey-green greasy Limpopo all set about with fever trees – must have been no more than trickles and flickering streams before they grew into mighty rivers.

Are people like that? I wondered. Am I like that? Always me, like the river itself, and always life flowing through me but always different, like the water flowing in the river, sometimes walking steadily along
andante
, sometimes surging over rapids
furioso
, sometimes meandering with hardly any visible movement
tranquillo, lento, ppp pianissimo
, sometimes gurgling
giocoso
with pleasure, sometimes sparkling
brilliante
in the sun, sometimes
impetuoso
, sometimes
lacrimoso
, sometimes
appassionato
, sometimes
misterioso
, sometimes
pesante
, sometimes
legato
, sometimes
staccato
, sometimes
sospirando
, sometimes
vivace
, and always, I hope,
amoroso
.

Do I change like a river, widening and deepening, eddying back on myself sometimes, bursting my banks sometimes when there’s too much water, too much life in me, and sometimes dried up from lack of rain? Will the I that is me grow and widen and deepen? Or will I stagnate and become an arid riverbed? Will I allow people to dam me up and confine me between walls so that I flow only where they want? Will I allow them to turn me into a canal to use for their own purposes (as Mrs Blacklin had tried to do)? Or will I make sure I flow freely, coursing my way through the land and ploughing a valley of my own?

displaying no signs of life. Neither of them did, not even when she coughed to make sure they knew she was there.

She sat in the same pew near the back of the church. But the Bible had gone and there were no other books nearby. She felt awkward, with nothing to occupy her. She had her school bag, thought of doing some homework, but that didn’t seem right somehow. So she copied the vicar, sat stock still and stared straight ahead. At first, she desperately wanted to leave, but after a few minutes the silence began to soothe her and she felt herself ‘settling into the stillness’.

The church clock was striking five when she came in. She was surprised when she heard it chime six. She didn’t think she’d been there that long.

On the stroke of the hour, the vicar got up and walked down the aisle towards her. She knew as soon as he stood up he meant to speak to her and she wanted to leave but that would have been even more embarrassing.

‘Sorry to intrude,’ he said, ‘but were you wanting to see me?’

‘No no. Just wanted to look at the church.’ It was the best excuse she could think of.

‘And you haven’t come for Evensong?’ the vicar asked.

‘No. Am I in the way?’

‘Not at all. Rather hoped you might have. Gets a bit lonely saying it by myself every day.’

‘Then why bother?’ Ms M. said and blushed at her unintended rudeness. She was trying to be jokey, which is usually a mistake on such occasions.

‘Part of my job, you see,’ the vicar said, taking her seriously. ‘Matins and Eucharist said in church every morning. Evensong every evening. Most of my colleagues don’t nowadays. But what else is a priest for, if not to pray on behalf of the people who don’t? I’m a bit traditional, I’m afraid. Out of date, I’m told.’