‘I’m not fooling. Tell me. I want to know.’
‘Because – because—’
‘See!’
‘Will! All right! I know how I know. But we’re not in the right mood to tell you. Forget it. For now. But it does matter to me, Will.’
‘To me too. Don’t you think it does?’
And he took hold of me, which is always fatal to words.
‘Yes yes,’ I said, ‘I think it does.’
‘D’you know it does?’
‘Yes, I know it does.’
We shut up.
But will she? No. Mrs interfering Blacklin will interfere again. I just know it. I can feel it in my bones.
O, Will, my Will! I am so so so in love with you. And I know you are with me. Why can’t you just say it?!!!!!!!!
Pre-Saga
Mrs B.’s interference was the last straw. Next day I confronted Will with my plan for a sex saga. Immediately after our meeting I wrote in my pillow book:
He said, Okay, let’s do it.
Straight away. No argument. No discussion.
I couldn’t believe it. I told him about Dad and Mum and the White Horse, and about Dad and Doris, and about how it all made me feel I didn’t just want to have sex with him just to unvirgin myself, but because I needed it with him to get me (and him I hoped) where I had to go with him. Though where that is, I don’t know.
I said I couldn’t explain, it was just all feelings. Intuition. Maybe I’d be able to afterwards. Sometimes, I said, I can only explain things after I’ve done them. Wasn’t it like that for him sometimes? And he said yes it was, so let’s do it. I said, But are you sure you want to? And not just for the sex either? And he said yes he did want to and not – he was very firm about not – just for the sex.
Then I told him about the sex saga. I was trembling just talking about it, but didn’t tell him it was Doris’s idea because I thought that might put him off. He laughed and said it was molto brilliante, which was such a relief, because I’d expected he’d think it was naff and would look down his nose and finger his glasses in the snooty way he does when he disapproves of anything. So we each wrote the place we wanted to go to on a slip of paper, and tossed a coin to decide who should pick the winning slip, which came out his call, and he picked my choice. (My lucky day again.)
And that’s when he said, We’ll bunk school and go tomorrow, strike while the iron, okay?
I didn’t think twice. It felt so good that he was taking the initiative and being decisive at last. And I wanted to put myself in his hands, I wanted to give myself up to him at this important moment. It just seemed necessary. To trust him, I mean. Even when breaking the rules and maybe getting ourselves into trouble. Especially when breaking the rules. Not that bunking off amounts to anything much where rule-breaking is concerned compared with what some people get up to. But still.
All evening we’ve been getting everything ready, him at his place, me at mine, and phoning every five minutes to check on this and decide on that, which is too boring to write down and I don’t have time anyway because it’s late already and I want to go to bed because I must be as fit as I can be tomorrow, though I don’t know if I’ll sleep at all there’s so much going on in my head, which is jauncing like mad, and in my body, which is in a complete roil, and in my imagination, which is a porn movie to be honest.
O lordy lordy, it’s going to happen at last, really going to happen, and with the boy I chose, my William, who I love to the other side of besotted. Please, dear goddess Epona, in whose eye I started my life, please make everything right. Please make it good. Please make me good. I don’t mean just sex good, but good in every way. Good for my William.
Reading that now, I smile at myself. At my surprise that everything happened as suddenly as it did. Because that’s exactly the way life treats you. You struggle with something, get nowhere, want to give up, feel a failure, almost do give up, and then it happens, you get what you want, all of a sudden. And it’s such a surprise; you have to learn the lesson afresh every time.
As for being in love, is there anything new to say about it? Is there anything new to say about having sex? In fact, is there anything new to say about anything? But we have to click the Refresh button every time and say it all again. Everything in life is a surprised repetition of the already known. So here I am, click click, telling the old old story again, because it’s my story and it was my first time and it was news to me and I want to tell it, just for you. One day (if not already) it will be a first-time story for you too. Will you tell me your story? And how will our stories compare? I wonder.
You gave me a smart kick in the belly as I wrote those words, which I take to mean: Get on with it!
Saga
We are driving in a retired funeral car his dad has allowed Will to use since he passed his test two weeks ago. The lights of the herded traffic lowing its way to work, its way to school, are crisp in the early morning gloom. I am accused by them. Spotted. Fingered.
The heater is on the blink. I huddle against the cold. There is no radio. We churn along in silence. We say nothing. Nothing can be said because the only thing to say is, Do you still want to do this? And we both know it would be a lie to answer yes.
The anti-climax of setting off.
Will drives us but only will drives us on.
When feelings turn against you, can you trust yourself? Can you trust others? And how do you know? At this moment I’m not sure of anything any more. A funeral car seems a vehicle fit to carry me to the fate I’ve made for myself.
Miles later I glance at Will, his profile framed in the window of his door, his head haloed by the dawn sky. The lights of passing cars shift its shadows and shapes, highlight his nose, his mouth, trouble his eyes, illuminate the cluster of his hair.
I know again why I’m doing this. Why it must be him.
I feel warmed.
‘Talk to me,’ I say. (Meaning: attend to me, notice me.)
He keeps his eyes on the road.
‘What about?’
‘Anything.’ (Meaning me, meaning us.) ‘Trees.’
‘I’m concentrating,’ he says but smiles. ‘You talk to me. Keep me awake.’
I don’t want to, but want to please him.
‘I’ll tell you about where we’re going, okay?’
We’re going to a church. A very old church.
How old? asks Will.
I don’t know how old. Old old. Very old. And very small. No bigger inside than a tennis court. Just a hut made of stone really. With a little pointed cap on the front end where a bell hangs. But it isn’t used any more. It’s a dechurched church.
Deconsecrated, says Will.
It’s at the end of a cart track off a back road, across two fields, with a walled graveyard all round and a parcel of trees at one side and the top end.
What sort of trees?
I don’t know. Tree kind of trees. You tell me when you see them. Are you listening?
He allows me a small smile.
There’s an old ash tree beside the gate which was split down the middle by lightning a long time ago but is still growing.
How d’you know it’s an ash tree?
My favourite grandfather, my father’s father, told me. You can still see where it was burnt. A cow was standing under it at the time. It wasn’t killed, but its neck was injured and it went round with its head cricked to one side for the rest of its life.
Poor moo.
My grandfather was baptised in the church and his ashes were scattered in the graveyard. His father, my great-grandfather, is buried there. He was a farmer. The church was on his land. My grandfather left the farm when he was sixteen. He didn’t want to be a farmer. He wanted to be a car mechanic and live in a city. So the farm was sold when my great-grandpa was too old to run it. My dad says he never got over it. The farm being sold, his life’s work. His father’s too. My great-great-grandfather. He’s buried in the churchyard too.
When he was old and retired
my grandpa used to like visiting the church. He used to take me with him when I was little, six or seven. He’d sit for ages beside his father’s grave and say nothing. Just stare. I mean, for ages. He called it resting his mind. The church is called St George’s. Maybe that’s why he named my father George. I did ask him once why he liked coming there. He said, because his there was there. I asked him what he meant. He said I’d find out when I knew where my there was. I asked him how I’d know where my there was, and he said I’d know because it would tell me. I said, Does it talk to you? And he said, Yes, it does, but not in words.
I liked going with him. He’d take things for a picnic. Favourite things. Ice cream. Lemon cake. Fruit. Unusual biscuits. All sorts of drinks. Which were specially for me. He only drank beer. He didn’t try to amuse me. He left me to play on my own in the churchyard and in the church. I liked that too. When I got fed up with poking about the churchyard and looking at the graves I used to go inside and pretend to be a priest. I’d dress up in churchy clothes I found in the little vestry, which is hardly bigger than a cupboard. And then I’d preach sermons from the lovely little pulpit, which looks like an eggcup made of wood. I had to stand on two prayer cushions—
Hassocks.
– to see over the top. And once I performed a communion service at the altar with a mug of Ribena for the wine and a Rich Tea biscuit, Granddad’s favourite, for the bread or whatever they call those wafer things—
Hosts.
– and said gobbledegook prayers in a priesty voice. But when I’d done it I got scared in case God or somebody might be vexed with me, and ran outside to Granddad and said it was time to go home now.
Sacrilege!
I was only eight. But still, I know! The church has been de-what’s-it-named for ages.
Deconsecrated. You know the word by now.
But I like you to correct me and I like to hear you say it. I want to go there with you and have my first sex there with you because I was always happy when my grandfather took me there, and it belongs to my childhood, and having sex for the first time will be the end of my childhood, I just feel it. And I want my childhood to end there with you in the old church. And also for another reason I’ll tell you later, because I can see you’re getting hyper bored with this story.
No, I’m not.
And anyway, I want to keep the other reason for later.
‘Leah?’
‘Liam?’
‘This church. It does have some heating?’
‘Heating?’
‘December. Winter?’
‘Will it matter?’
‘Pretty damp as well as cold.’
‘We’ve brought warm things. Couldn’t we light a fire?’
‘In an old church? There’s a fireplace? And what about the smoke? Someone might see. We’d get thrown out.’
I hadn’t thought of that.
Will is silent.
*
Silence. There are so many kinds. Heavy, dark, sunny, thick, comfortable, empty, ominous, angry, light, airy, loving, sour, brooding, meditative, absorbed, happy, sad, absent, etc. This one is brittle, sharp. A lip-curled silence.
‘It’ll be all right,’ I say. ‘We’ll manage, won’t we? Part of the fun?’
‘Yes.’
A yes that meant no. A no that meant, You’ve bodged, ballsed up, not thought. Not to think is a kind of crime with Will. For him to say of someone, ‘He can’t think,’ is one of his most damning insults. Not to have given thought to something is almost as bad. He’s frightening sometimes.
I sit in my seat as one struck by a chopping hand, aware of my seat belt slicing between my breasts. But I’ve met this mood before. When we play music badly. When interrupted by friends (just not thinking!) at times when Will wants us to be alone and we can’t be. Whenever he feels he hasn’t achieved some goal set by and known only to himself. At which times other people cannot understand why he’s in such a spite.
I’d thought before how difficult he can be. And this time hear myself say to myself, Would I want a boy who isn’t? Could I fall in love with someone who is easy, simple, straightforward, predictable? And today I know the answer is no. I have what I want.
Besides, I also know by now these moods don’t last. They are merely passing clouds. And the cooling shade of their shadows can be a welcome change, a relief from the intensity of the sun.
I look out of my window so that he cannot see my face.
strapped in
beside you,
withholding
my knowledge
of you folded
inside me,
I smile.
After a few miles, ‘Chocolate?’ Will asks.
‘Please.’
‘Glove compartment.’
Belgian white. My favourite. He knew and had put it there as a surprise.
I slip a piece into his appetising mouth.
‘Grazie.’
‘Prego.’
We arrive in fog, ghost our way down the rutted track hoping no one sees us, park behind the church in the parcel of skeleton trees (beech, Will says), where we hope the car is out of sight.
The main door of the church is locked. The vestry door seems to be until Will applies a brisk nudge with his shoulder. Its bottom edge, swollen by damp, stutters against the stone-flagged floor.
Inside, emptiness. Cleared out. The altar, an oblong slab of thick grey stone supported on slabby legs, stands naked, its cloth and cross and candles gone. The eggcup pulpit addresses absence. Brass eagle lectern bearing a Bible as heavy as a house, gone. Bench pews gone. In the far corner a black potbellied stove I had forgotten squats like the corpse of a bad-tempered old man with a beer gut, its tubular chimney snaking up to exit through the roof. His wife, a wheezy old harmonium I used to try and play, gone. Little baptismal font, which stood near the door, gone. Kneelers, prayer books, hymn books, Mothers’ Union banner, three brass oil-lamp chandeliers that hung from the rafters, all gone. Even the few plaques on the walls that commemorated in slate and lettered marble the lives of a few local nobs are gone, leaving behind raw geometric scars as their own memorial. Even the dust, grounded by damp, seems not to be there. No motes float in the milky light that filters through the diamond panes leaded into the six little arched windows.
The place is stripped bare. It’s a deconsecrated, defrocked church denuded of life. It smells of decay, of rot, of mouldy death.
‘O, Will,’ I say. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t know. We shouldn’t have come.’
He’s walking around, gazing up at the timbered roof, at the stark altar, at the silvered oak pulpit, on which he rubs a hand as if caressing a loved body, and inspects the cold stove.
I want to cry.
He leans against the west wall with a smile on his face I’ve not seen before, surveying the building and me standing in the middle of the floor.
‘No no,’ he says. ‘It’s lovely.’
‘Lovely?’
‘Really.’
‘You like it?’
‘Come and look.’
I join him, clutching his arm for comfort.
‘See?’ he says. ‘This is how it was the day they finished building it. Look at the proportions. Aren’t they perfect? The shape and the height, just right. And the roof. The A-frames, the stringers, the rafters. All good oak. They fly. And the neat little windows down the sides, exactly placed. Look at the altar. Hard stone. Heavy. Solid and ancient. The pulpit. Growing out of the floor like a flower. No weight at all. Old wood, but it looks fresh and new. This is the real church. This is how it was meant to be. Only the essentials. The furniture and ornaments and other stuff were clutter. This is right. Lovely. Natural. Beautiful. Really beautiful. You could worship here. I could anyway.’
*
Seeing with other eyes. We were studying The Tempest that term. One of my most favourite of Shakes’s plays. I remembered how Miranda and Ferdinand fall for each other at first sight. (What naff losers! scoffed the chavs.) And how Daddy
Prospero, observing them, says, ‘They have changed eyes.’ And I knew it to be true because I felt my own eyes really were changed the moment I fell for Will.
Now I think that it could also mean that Miranda and Ferdinand have exchanged eyes, each seeing with the other’s. And I think how it’s true that your view of the world can be changed by seeing it through a lover’s eyes, as Will has just changed my view of this church.
In the car I’d realised how I could only fall in love with someone who was difficult because he is particular and strong in his self. Now I knew something else. I can only remain in love with someone who knows how to re-vision me.
‘I’ll bring the gear in,’ Will says.
New eyes bring inspiration.
I tear a sheet from my notebook and write a short list. Then help Will unload the car.
That done, I say, ‘There are some things I need that I didn’t think of at home. Can you get them while I fix things up? We passed a supermarket on the edge of town.’
He takes the list, saying, ‘There’s something I want as well.’
‘When you get back, wait in the vestry till I tell you to come in. I want everything to be right.’
He leaves. No kiss, not even a look back. As if we are fasting before the feast. So much is going on between us the air crackles. I feel my hair might stand on end. My arms and legs are pincushions.
When he’s driven away I go outside and breathe deeply to dispel the static, and then scribble a mope to calm myself before setting to.
Why is it I know what to say
until you appear when
words melt in my spine?
Why is it I know what to do
until you appear and I
lose my native skills?
I am your instrument,
your fingers play my keys,
your lips blow the wind
out of my lost soul.
Why do you play your tune
on my heart
so mercilessly?