This Is All

by Aidan Chambers

  He laughed. Me too. Both of us needing relief.

  ‘Seems to me,’ he said, ‘women always know more about men than men know about women. Or men know about themselves, come to that.’

  And some of my mother at my feet.

  I said, ‘We’re going to scatter Mum’s ashes on the horse.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But, Dad. Why today? Why not on the anniversary of the day you came up here? Or your wedding?’

  ‘Ah, now we get to it. That’s the point. Your mother wanted children. Some people want to be doctors or engineers or actors or footballers or whatever. Your mother wanted to be a mother. From the day we were married we tried. Tried and tried. But nothing. Three, four years. Began to upset her. Really really upset her. The doctors said there was nothing wrong with either of us. No reason why she shouldn’t conceive.’

  A young couple in rambling gear stood for a moment near us. When they moved on:

  ‘One afternoon. Bright March day. An early spring that year. Your mother said she wanted to come here. I thought she just felt like a ride out. But when we got here she said we were staying the night. She’d stowed everything we needed in the boot of the car without me knowing. You’ve read the leaflet. The horse is supposed to be the goddess Epona—’

  ‘Goddess of fertility, health and death.’

  ‘And there’s a legend. If a woman spends a night on the eye of the horse she’ll conceive.’

  ‘You didn’t!’

  ‘We hung around till after dark. No one about by then. Your mother laid a sleeping bag over the horse’s eye. And we spent the night there. Afterwards, your mother wouldn’t let us try again till after her next period was due. It didn’t come.’

  ‘She was pregnant.’

  ‘Your mother always believed you were conceived here that night.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘I’ve no doubt you were.’

  ‘But – you don’t believe it had anything to do with the horse? Or the goddess Epona?’

  ‘No.’

  The horse and some of my mother at my feet.

  ‘Dad, what do you believe?’

  ‘You mean, what do I believe in? Like God or whatever?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Contingency.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Contingency. I believe in contingency. Some people call it “happy accident”.’

  ‘What happens just happens but for no reason?’

  ‘More than that. It might be true you were conceived that night because of the horse goddess. It might not.’

  ‘But only one can be true, can’t it?’

  ‘No. Both can be true. Both can exist at the same time. As a possibility. All we know, the only fact we can be sure of, is that you were conceived that night. Whether because of the horse goddess or for some other reason is beyond what we can know.’

  ‘And you think everything is like that? Everything in the world?’

  ‘Everything there is anywhere.’

  ‘In the whole universe?’

  ‘And whatever else there is beyond that. And I’m sure there is more than just our universe.’

  ‘Shouldn’t you say you believe there’s more than our universe? You can’t know, can you?’

  ‘Touché! So that’s something I believe, after all. That there’s a lot more to know than we know. And a lot more we already know that we can’t understand.’

  ‘But no god?’

  ‘No. No god.’

  ‘What about Mum?’

  ‘She believed that everything is all one, and everything is held together by a power, a force, whatever – there are no words for what she meant. It’s a mystery. And this power, this force is in everything. Everything is made of it. And it itself is more than everything. She said people call this mystery God because there is no other word for it. And they find ways to express it that don’t need words. Like this horse. She just accepted that this power or whatever it is just is. That it’s there, in us, in everything. And that it’s more than us and everything. And she believed that at some special times and in some special places we can get closer to it, can get in touch with it, more than at other times and in other places.’

  ‘And she believed this was one of those special places and the night you spent here when I was conceived was one of those special times?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  I shivered. ‘Lordy! What a thought!’

  He put his arm round me and hugged me to him and kissed the top of my head.

  ‘I can’t really explain it. I wish she were here to explain it to you herself. If I could be granted one wish, only one wish for the whole of my life, that would be it. That she was here with us now.’

  And some of my mother at our feet.

  Dad stood up. Picked up the box.

  ‘How are we going to do this?’

  I got up and stood beside him.

  ‘Never done anything like this before.’

  ‘When we did it at Doris’s, she read something she’d written.’

  ‘You?’

  ‘Scattered the ashes. Didn’t say anything. Couldn’t.’

  ‘If you’d told me I could have prepared.’

  ‘Might have spoilt it, don’t you think?’

  ‘Yes. Still.’

  ‘What I think.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘We’ll stand beside the head. I’ll open the box. You scatter the ashes. Nothing else. Enough. No need for words. After all, what more is there to say?’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Right.’

  We took the few steps down the hill to the top of the horse’s head. You’d think, seeing it from afar, that it’s big. But it isn’t. And close up, it’s like a child’s drawing carefully drawn on the grass.

  Neither of us could look at the other.

  Dad held the box out to me. I took it. Such a strange sensation. He produced a little brass key from his pocket and steadying the box with one hand as I held it inserted the key, turned it, withdrew it, and took a step away.

  I opened the lid. A snug fit. It lifted on little brass hinges. Inside was three-quarters full of fine light-grey powder. I looked and looked. It was then I couldn’t hold back the tears any longer. I thought, I’m meant just to tip the box and spill the ashes out. But that somehow seemed insufficient. Unworthy. This grey ash was not to be tipped out like unwanted dust. It was once my mum. I had once been part of it. It had borne me. It had made me. Made me right here one night sixteen years and nine months ago. With a little help from Dad.

  It was then I felt Dad’s hand on my arm. I knew he meant, Please do it.

  On impulse, but as if ordered to do so, I stepped over the chalk line of the horse’s head onto the grass inside. Felt like I was transgressing. Entering the sanctuary of a church without permission. Then, holding the box in one hand, dipped into it with the other, scooped up a handful of Mother’s ashes, gritty on my fingers, unexpectedly warm. And slowly slowly, small step by small step, walked round and round the horse’s head in narrowing circles until I reached the eye, all the time allowing the grey powder that was once my mother to sieve through my fingers and fall in a thin gentle stream onto the grass. Like the sands of time. Like sowing seed. Finishing with a palmful of ash veiling the white eye itself.

  All done, the box empty, I rejoined Dad.

  We stood side-by-side, hand-in-hand.

  Till it seemed right to turn away, retrieve Dad’s backpack, and walk to the car as wordlessly as we had arrived.

  Clothed words

  My Shakespeare Lexicon infected me with an obsession. I began to write words onto self-sealing tape – the kind we used for name tags on our school clothes – and to stick them onto parts of my clothes in places where they wouldn’t be seen by other people. Each word was special in some way, because I liked the look of it, or the sound of it, or the meaning. I especially liked words I discovered were invented by Shakespeare, which is quite a lot. And each word was carefully matched to the piece of
clothing and attached in an appropriate place.

  Izumi regarded this as weird. And I suppose I have to admit that it was. But one thing I know: everybody is more weird than they ever admit. In their minds if not in other ways. In fact, think of the most weird thing you can possibly imagine, and the truth is that somebody somewhere is already doing it. Being verbally weird seems to me to be pretty mild stuff compared with some of the behaviour I’ve heard of.

  The first word I stuck onto my clothes the night after my day out with Father was Epona, the name of the horse goddess. I attached her name to the inside of the waist-band at the back of a pair of white knickers that I especially liked.

  To the inside of the backside of an old pair of jeans I had never quite liked – the fit just wasn’t right, too floppy round the bum – I attached Shakes’s word dispraise.

  Under the exaggerated shoulder pad of a winter coat I applied prolixious.

  To the inside rim of a lacy bra: subtle. To the hem of a school skirt: fondly, meaning it in Shakes’s sense: ‘foolishly, in a trifling, nugatory manner’. I stuck nugatory, ‘of little value’ – a word Shakes never used – to the inside leg of my gym pants. To a favourite T-shirt Shakes’s initiate. To the inside of a shoe: inebriate. To a mini-skirt: sumptuous. To a tight grey top with low neck: nuzzle. To a thong, Shakes’s drossy: ‘futile, frivolous’.

  After a while some things had so many words inside them the pieces of tape resembled the rows of medals on a field marshal’s chest. The obsession got so bad I wanted to cover all my clothes in words. So I rationed myself to only those with extra-special meanings or associations. Of course the word Will was blazoned on just about everything.

  I grew out of this obsession after a few months. But I thought of it this morning when I came across gorbellied and couldn’t resist attaching it to the voluminous maternity dress I’ve just bought to cover you in my swollen womb. I stuck it on the inside at about the place which will cover my distended navel. And underneath it: imminent. And under imminent I affixed your name. But I’m not going to mention that till after you’re born, so as not to tempt fate.

  Skinprint

  From my pillow book after our trip to the horse:

  This week I dreamed every night.

  Every night I dreamed of the horse. Sometimes bits of the horse. Head. Boomerang legs. Whiplash tail. Eye. Looking at me. The eye in the head. Sometimes I was the horse. The horse was me. I am a horse. I am Epona.

  I dreamed galloping breathless tiring dreams.

  I woke unslept.

  This week I longed for my mother. Needed to see her. Searched all the family photos. She wasn’t there. Dad had censored her, excised her, banned my mother. Why? ‘To save myself from pain,’ he said. But with persuasion he rendered her up. He’d hidden her in a box at the back of his wardrobe. Photos of her from childhood till when she was ill just before she died. In two big albums.

  Photos. Photos are not like words. Words are alive. They speak to you. They are always now. Though they were written in the past, even in the long long ago (as beloved Shakes), they are still alive when you read them. Words never die. While men can breathe and eyes can see, So long lives this and this gives life to thee. Lordy, yes, how true! People die. Mothers die. And unlike words, photos of dead mothers are dead too. Milli-seconds of light. Shadows caught by chemistry in the tomb of a camera. Photos are always memorials, the graves of ghosts. All photo albums are cemeteries.

  I gave the photos back to Dad. ‘You were right,’ I said. And like a patted puppy, he wagged his tail and grinned.

  I look like my mother when she was my age.

  I don’t know what to think about that. Is it necessary to think anything? Why do I always think I should think something about everything? Why do I want to know so much – No, not know. What? Be aware of? Be conscious of? Yes, that’s it. I want to be conscious of everything. I don’t know why. But I do I do I do. I want to be conscious of everything. And I hope that one day I will understand why.

  *

  I have had a torrendous week.

  I have not seen Will.

  O Will, my Will!

  Not once. Not even in school. Didn’t want to. (Did want to, but didn’t want to more.)

  I fled from him. I hid from him. Even inside myself I fled from him and hid from him.

  He doesn’t understand. (He doesn’t understand! So? I don’t understand either.)

  What’s the matter? he ems me again and again. (I like it that he ems me again and again because it means he minds, he cares, he wants me. Doesn’t it?)

  hv i dn smthng wrng, he texts.

  no, I reply.

  He wakeup phones. We talk, but not about us. I can’t. I won’t. He doesn’t press it. O I hate myself for doing this!

  I don’t know how to make sense of myself. There is so much to make sense of there is too much to make sense of. One day in a year, and all my life is turned inside out upside down the wrong way round.

  I’ve been sticking words into clothes like there’s no tomorrow. (There never is tomorrow, there is only today.) Why does this give me comfort?

  I have done zilch work at school. Ms Martin enquired. I said, ‘Don’t ask.’ She hugged me. ‘Whatever it is,’ she said, ‘this too shall pass.’ She is the best teacher in the whole world. I mean it. She is. I wanted to hug her back. But daren’t. It would have been too much. More too muching. I took her a Mars bar. A Mars bar?! I mean! I felt like a prepube Year Eight sprog again.

  I want to be a woman.

  I want to be grown up.

  But how do you do it?

  *

  Izumi came.

  ‘Need glow time,’ she said.

  We went to my Doris room. Couldn’t stand my Dad room a second longer. No glow time would have happened there.

  I told Izumi about my clothes-word binge. ‘Weird,’ she said, but in a way I knew she liked it. And she giggled her Nippon gigs. I love her gigs. I love Izumi. Really love her. She is my best friend.

  She said, ‘Why only on clothes? Why not on body?’

  She made me lie on the bed. She undressed me. Everything. She massaged me head to toe. Slowly. With orange blossom in grapeseed oil. Then she towelled me down. Then she gave me my hand mirror to hold so I could see what she did. And she began to write on my body with eye-liners and lipsticks and eye-shadowers and face paints.

  On my chin in blue: flower.

  On my right boob in red: succulent.

  On my left boob in black: perky.

  Around my navel in green: lost in moon.

  She drew a black arrow from my navel down to the hair of my bush and wrote in mauve along the shaft of the arrow: pleasure.

  On the inside of my right thigh she wrote in pink: sensational.

  On the inside left: yearning.

  On one knee: hinge; on the other: pray.

  On the sole of one foot: earth; on the other soul.

  She turned me over onto my stomach.

  ‘Say words,’ she whispered, ‘give dictation.’

  confused, friend, lost, found, craving, horse, Epona, William, pining, mother, Izumi.

  I felt her writing these on my shoulder blades and down my spine and on my buttocks, on the backs of my thighs and knees, on my calves.

  ‘Where did you write horse?’ I asked.

  ‘In crack of bum.’

  ‘Where William?’

  ‘Along line of waist. And now I write beautiful on back of neck. In Japan we think back of neck most erotic.’

  And then speeding up, faster and faster, till in a frenzy I fired words like bullets and Izumi scribbled them onto me here there and everywhere, back and front and sides, and hands and face, even my lips, till I was covered all over in our impetuous lexicon. How many words I do not know. It felt like all the words in the dictionary.

  ‘Now,’ Izumi said, flinging off her clothes, throwing them away as I had never seen her do before, she being so tidy and precise normally, ‘now I print your words on myself.’r />
  And she spread herself on me, first back-to-back, pressing herself against me as hard as she could. And then front to front, legs to legs, bush to bush, boobs to boobs, our arms round each other, eyes open and looking into each other’s, and finally mouth to mouth, Izumi kissing me to imprint my lips on hers.

  I said, ‘We’re kissing words.’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘no. I eat your unhappiness. None left inside when finished.’

  And when she finished, she stood and looked at herself in my full-length mirror, so beautiful, so lovely, her body smeared in many mixed-up colours, no words at all, all my words smudged into silence by the rub of her body on mine.

  I got up and stood beside her. We put our arms round each other’s waist and looked at each other coupled in the mirror. All my words smudged all over me too.

  At which we broke into giggles and fell in a hissy fit onto the bed.

  And it was glow time.

  And by the end I knew I must talk to Doris.

  Heart to heart

  Today, another visit to the ante-natal clinic. For the first time I heard your heart. The beat of your heart.

  They fed the sound through an amplifier. The iambic beat of your heart ti-tum ti-tum ti-tum filled the room, surrounding me.