This Is All (88 page)

In the afternoon a plain-clothes police detective turned up
with a uniformed policewoman. This upset me. Dad hadn’t said he’d told the police. They’d been to the barn, collected evidence, taken Cal’s van away for examination, and put out a wanted notice. They made me tell the story again, wrote it down and made me sign it. They said I’d have to appear in court when they caught Cal. By this time I was angry as well as upset. I said I didn’t want to accuse Cal of anything. I understood why he’d behaved like he did. Treating him like a criminal would only make him worse. Why couldn’t they do something to help him? They said he’d attacked me and the law had to take its course. I said I wouldn’t accuse him of anything. They said that without my testimony there’d be no case against him, they’d have to let him go and he’d be free to attack someone else. Dad and Doris agreed with them. I said he hadn’t attacked me, not in the way they were trying to make out. What he’d done he’d done out of love for me. A funny kind of love, they said. I said, but it was still love, not hate or a liking for violence, and that he wouldn’t behave like that with anyone else. He wasn’t a rapist or a thug, just a hurt and mixed-up person, who life had treated badly and who needed proper help not punishment. I said I wished I could help him but I didn’t know how. They said I’d do well to steer clear of him and to report it to them if he ever showed up. Julie said nothing, I knew she’d agree with me, but not being family she had no standing in the discussion except as my friend and was told from the start that she had to stay silent or leave.

I began to detest them. I wanted all of them except Julie out of my room. They were a violation of my sacred space, my private sanctuary. I shut up, withdrew into myself, and waited for them to go, which they did as soon as they realised they’d reached an impasse. I suppose they thought they’d got what they came for anyway. I disliked their compartmented arrogance, their certainty that they were right and that this was the only way things could be done. I also felt Dad (and
therefore Doris, because she must have known what Dad had done) had betrayed me. He should have talked to me before calling the police. I knew he’d say I’d been in too bad a state to talk to and to think rationally and that the police would have to act quickly if they were to catch Cal, but I didn’t care about that, I felt he’d let me down. Looking back, I know his only intention was to protect me and do the right thing. But that isn’t how I thought at the time.

For the next few days I stayed at home sunk in depression, not leaving my room, save to go to the bathroom. Other than Dad and Doris, I saw no one except Arry, who brought me little presents to cheer me up (flowers, perfume, a CD, some chocolate, and a new notebook and pencil – hoping they would tempt me to write, which they didn’t), and Julie, who sat with me most of the evening every day. We said very little. I didn’t want to talk, having nothing to say, and she knew better than to chatter. Mostly she spent the time doing her school work while I read or listened to music. And we meditated together, which meant little more for me than staring blankly into space. But the ritual of preparation was a big help and comfort – showering, doing our hair, making ourselves up, putting on clothes that suited our mood, choosing a text to focus our minds, arranging the lights, burning incense candles, playing the right music, setting up the icon, settling ourselves into our meditation posture. It was an oasis in the wilderness of my gloom.

After a week of this, Julie suggested it would be good if I had a change. Why not a cycle ride, a meal at her place, and stay the night? D&D were only too glad to agree. My immobility and low spirits were beginning to irritate their pragmatic natures. (I didn’t need to hear what they’d be saying. Dad: Everybody has bad experiences. Why doesn’t she just pull herself together and get on with life? Doris: Work is the best cure. She should go to school and put the upset behind her.) I dithered. The more you stay in your shell the
less you want to leave it – in fact, the more you fear leaving it. It was Arry who persuaded me. Not with words, but by cleaning my bike and checking the tyres after Dad retrieved it from the police, packing an overnight bag, laying out the clothes I’d need, offering to come with us for the ride if that would make me feel better, but all the time acting like he expected me to go, no discussion, no questions asked. Persuasion by assumption, no doubts acknowledged. Dear dear Arry, what an unselfish friend he has always been.

And I did feel better in mind and body after the ride, and it was such a pleasure to be with Julie in her place again, and such a relief to be away from the tensions at home. I laughed that day for the first time since Cal. But still, by the time we went to bed the gloom had settled on me again, as night darkens day. And next morning I was so low at the prospect of returning home that Julie phoned Dad and suggested I stay with her. He didn’t object. Before she went to school Julie persuaded me to try writing an essay on Coleridge. By the time she returned that afternoon I’d managed two sentences. She didn’t comment. There was just time for a run round the park before it was closed for the night.

Then it was the weekend. On Saturday morning I went home, did my laundry, collected things I wanted and returned to Julie’s. Dad and Doris were tolerant but their disapproval leaked through. There was no news of Cal. Dad said he could tell the police had lost interest. I didn’t say I was glad, because I didn’t want another lecture on the subject of crime and punishment and the danger I’d been in and how could I be so irresponsible as to want to let Cal get off scot-free.

I got up late on Sunday morning. Julie was busy cooking in the kitchen, not her usual Sunday activity. She said it was something special, she’d explain later, why didn’t I get myself ready for a bike ride, it being a lovely crisp day? I showered and dressed. While I was in my bedroom I heard the front
door, but no voices. Then a moment later the front door again and silence. Being in the back bedroom I couldn’t see what was going on in the street.

I went downstairs.

Will was standing in the middle of the front room alone.

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Book 5, The Yellow Pillow Box
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Writing

I write to read the life I cannot live otherwise.
See 
Consciousness
. 

X Factor

The X Factor is something I have not got. At least, not in the ways I’d like to have it. (Another example of the rule that what you want you don’t have and what you don’t want you have.)

For example, when I was eleven there was a girl in my form called Frances Delaney. She had big ears and long thin brown hair, so she didn’t have the x factor in the beauty department. At least, not until we were asked to perform a scene from a play by our would-be dramatist English teacher. We were allotted parts, Frances Delaney was given a role we regarded as rubbish, but when it came to acting the play, she performed with such style that everyone thought she was brilliant and I remember envying her to the point of disintegration. As I watched her from the wings, I thought, I absolutely know I will never ever perform in public as well as that
ever
, and she can do it when she’s only eleven. I might have hated her, there were some of us who did, but as far as I was concerned Frances Delaney had the x factor. After that, big ears and thin brown hair didn’t matter, she was beautiful. Just because she’d performed so well.

Then there was Pelianda Zarola (I mean, with a name like
that …). When we were fifteen, we all had to be in the Christmas concert organised by our would-be impresario music teacher. Pelianda was in Year 12. She sang the last song with the rest of us younger ones as a backing group. The song was (hold your breath) ‘Edelweiss’ from
The Sound of Music
(I know, I know!). But the thing is, she sang it with so much of the x factor that I cried. Honestly, I blubbed. I find it hard to believe but I did. I mean ‘
Edelweiss
’! But you see: the effect of the x factor. Pelianda was also very good at art and later had an illicit affair with the art teacher, which was supposed to be a total secret so of course everyone knew. There was no doubt that Pelianda just oozed the sexual x factor. Listening to her sing and watching her at work on the art teacher demonstrated to me that she had what I did not.

The x factor bothers me sometimes. People should be careful what they say about it. A man friend of Dad’s once said to him about me and in my hearing, ‘She’ll never pull the boys.’ And I believed it until Will, who changed my mind at least where he was concerned. I’ve been to parties where girls who I thought were quite ugly, but had blonde hair and could strut their stuff when dancing, attracted the most delicious boys. They were girls who appeared to have made no effort with their appearance (though in fact I now know they probably took a great deal of trouble making themselves look as if they’d taken no trouble at all). Whereas I used to take a lot of trouble to make the trouble I’d taken show, but it didn’t do the job. Because I didn’t have the x factor.

So either:

(a) you have the x factor absolutely and in all departments and everybody knows it (as some film stars have it, for example), or

(b) you don’t have the x factor
at all ever
, or

(c) you have it in some things but not in others and those things make you have it once they are recognized, or

(d) you have it for the one person who, it turns out, is the
only one you want but you didn’t know you have it till he or she came along.

It seems I’m a (d) person, which I have decided is quite good enough and better than being a (b) person, thank you.

Yearning

I was going to write about this subject under the title Longing but changed my mind for two reasons.

The first is that there’s enough under L and I don’t have much else to say under Y.

But there’s a better reason. Which is that there are lots of meanings of the word ‘long’ but only one meaning of the word ‘yearn’.

Not that to long for something is exactly the same as to yearn for it. To long is to have a prolonged unsatisfied desire. To yearn is to have an intense desire or longing. Yearning is more than longing. Yearning includes longing; longing doesn’t include yearning.

I’m not saying it’s essential to yearn for something. That’s not why I’m including it in my alphabet of essentials. I’m including it because it seems to me, from my own experience and from observing other people, that yearning is an inevitable part of life. We all long for things, and these longings become so intense from time to time that they are yearnings.

For as long (!) as I can remember I’ve had a longing (!) for something. For a while I longed to the point of yearning to be a top notch piano player. Then Doris took me to a concert to see a very great pianist and I realised I would never be that good and the longing died that very evening. The night I looked at my dark reflection in the window of the bus and it came to me that all I really wanted to do was write poetry, I yearned – longed intensely – for days afterwards to be a poet. This yearning has now settled into a constant longing,
which I know will remain all my life, even when I consider I have become a poet, because I’m sure I’ll then long to be a better poet.

There was a patch when I was about thirteen when I longed for God (it never became a yearning). I longed to be loved by God, to be talked to by God, and especially to be singled out by God. But then Granddad Kenn died and for some reason I decided at his funeral that whatever the truth is about God or no-God, I didn’t know it, and that as God, if there was a God, was God of everybody, there was no way that God was going to talk to me or that I could be special to God. So this particular longing went to the grave with Granddad – or rather went up in smoke with him, because he was cremated.

This longing was very soon replaced by another, a longing to be loved for myself by someone else and to be loved only by him. Then I fell in love with Will, and lost him. And that’s when I suffered the yearning that was the most intense I have so far experienced, a yearning so intense it incapacitated me for days and depressed me for weeks. This truly was yearning. How did it manifest itself? By not allowing me to think of anything else but only of Will. I sat in my room and thought, What is he doing now? What is he saying now? Who is he with now? And more importantly, What is he thinking now? What is he feeling now? Does he like me or doesn’t he? Does he
love
me or doesn’t he? Will he come back to me? On and on, hour after hour, as if the repeat button had been switched on in my mind. And the thing that made it worst was that however much I thought about it, I couldn’t answer my desperate questions. I would try to imagine Will saying, ‘Yes, I do love you but I’m in a muddle about myself. Yes, I will come back to you but I don’t know how to do it.’ This would work for about five minutes and I’d feel better. But then I’d admit to myself that they weren’t really Will’s answers, I was making them up, and the yearning would start up again more
painfully than ever. I’ve never been any good at fantasising and believing manufactured dreams. I’m too aware of life as it is.

Though having said that, it is also true that I’ve never been satisfied with everyday life. I’ve always wanted more. Which I now believe is the cause of my perpetual longing. In the last year or two, particularly since Julie has taught me how to meditate and I’ve practised it as well as I can, I’ve realised that there are two threads to my constant longing, like a double helix. They are a longing to love and a longing to understand. I discovered with Will that if I love a man and am loved by a man I am happy and can deal with anything. But I also have to understand what is happening to me. It was losing Will that made me perceive this truth about myself most clearly.

So now I’m glad I long for things, and yearn for the things that matter most to me, because this directs my thinking, and helps me to focus on what I need to understand about myself. In this sense, longing and yearning are essential to me and to my life.