This Is All

by Aidan Chambers

  The last day, and the setting forth

  On the longest journey, over the hidden sea

  To the last wonder of oblivion.

  Oblivion, the last wonder!

  When we have trusted ourselves entirely

  To the unknown, and are taken up

  Out of our little ships of death

  Into pure oblivion.

  Oh build your ship of death, be building it now

  With dim, calm thoughts and quiet hands

  Putting its timbers together in the dusk,

  hoping his still-life image

  would distil through your fingers

  a touch of comfort.

  But it was

  no use without his hand

  to perform the magic.

  Fantasy is no substitute

  for flesh and blood.

  Fantasy cannot replace

  skin and bone, the real presence

  of another body.

  How alone,

  how much more alone

  that solitary failure made you feel,

  plumbing the depths of alone.

  Alone, alone, all all alone,

  Alone on a wide, wide sea.

  Unable to sort yourself out,

  You were out of sorts.

  You slept.

  Easiest escape

  – the innocent sleep,

  Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleave of care,

  The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath,

  Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,

  Chief nourisher in life’s feast.

  And woke,

  precisely at six.

  The house

  silent as the grave.

  A note

  on the kitchen table.

  Cordelia,

  Rigging its mast with the silent, invisible sail

  That will spread in death to the breeze

  Of the kindness of the cosmos, that will waft

  The little ship with its soul to the wonder-goal.

  Ah, if you want to live in peace on the face of the earth

  Then build your ship of death, in readiness

  For the longest journey, over the last of seas.

  Boring things

  Waiting for trains, buses, planes.

  Waiting for people who are late. (This also belongs to my list of Annoying things.)

  Waiting for anything or anybody at any time.

  Waiting.

  Drinks parties which I am dragged to by Dad, where there is no proper conversation even if I can hear what anyone says because of all the noise, and I have to wear clothes I don’t like and stand up all the time and be polite to everyone, most of whom I do not know.

  Being made to play sport when it’s cold and wet.

  Filling in forms. Every, all and any forms.

  Lessons on Friday afternoon.

  Getting up for school every morning.

  McDonald’s junk and the nasty little boxes it’s served in.

  Top of the boring Pops on tv.

  Sparky-chirpy female weather forecasters on tv who think they are celebrities and flick their fingers across the map as if they are hand dancers.

  Science fiction in books.

  Science fiction on tv in which the aliens all have disgustingly deformed faces and the humans wear tops that are hideous colours and are too tight, as if designed by someone with a grudge against the human body.

  Please don’t fret. All will be well.

  Gone to Dad’s. Supper at seven.

  See you then? We love you. Doris.

  Not I, but We.

  I includes You.

  We excludes I.

  Love is one-to-one,

  eye-to-eye.

  You felt rejected

  by that newly

  combined We.

  The place where you began

  was a dead end now.

  The place where you were

  was no longer yours.

  Where could you belong,

  and who to?

  Will

  was nowhere yet

  being everywhere was

  too knowing yet

  too young to know.

  Your mind was a blocked-up sink.

  Where could you find a plumber?

  Your heart had seized up.

  Who could doctor you?

  That evening, unable to be in Doris’s house a minute longer, I’d meant to go to Dad’s. But I couldn’t face the sight of Doris and Dad together as D&D in their new mode as lovey-doveys, however blasé and low key, nor their double act as ‘Mum and Dad’. So I got on my bike and pedalled past as

  Revision, when you have to write out chunks of information over and over again and learn it off by heart.

  Putting out the rubbish. Especially if the bag bursts (as it did this morning) and you have to clear up the mess.

  Answering the phone when it isn’t for you.

  Answering the phone when it’s people trying to sell things.

  People trying to sell things.

  Giving presents when you have to and not because you want to.

  Receiving presents that are nothing you want or would ever want.

  Practical jokes. They are played by people who are so inadequate that the only way they can feel good and get their rocks off is to humiliate someone else who can’t do anything about it because they don’t know the joke is being played until it happens. In fact, practical jokes are not jokes at all. They are forms of bullying and therefore abuse.

  Not having a good book to read when you need one.

  Boredom. Whenever I’m bored I feel a failure. Feeling a failure is very boring.

  Being told to cheer up – or to snap out of it or to look on the bright side or to count your blessings or to think how much better off you are than most people or to stop being such a pain in the neck or to go and boil your head or to be told you are just suffering from teenage growing pains (so aren’t grownups ever bored?) or to be told anything that is supposed to help or cure you – is boring when you are bored.

  Being told you will feel better if you go and do something. Doing anything when you’re bored is very very boring. Anyway, doing nothing is the point of being bored. The pleasure of being bored is mooning about and doing nothing.

  fast as I could in case I was spotted, and unthinkingly followed the familiar route to Will’s house. Even the cool of the evening, fanning by, didn’t prevent me breaking out in a sweat of anxiety. How could I explain to him? What if he didn’t understand? But at least he would calm me down with his kisses.

  Three cars I hadn’t seen before were parked in the Blacklins’ drive, one of them blocking the entrance. Visitors. The downstairs windows were open, exhaling the noise of party chatter and incidental music. No way was I in any shape to make an appearance and ask for Will. I looked for my mobile in my backpack, thinking I’d phone and ask him to come out. Only to find I’d left it behind. I cursed myself. When you’re already low, every stupid little mistake, every silly little mishap sends you farther down the spiral into the slough of despond, the slurry of self-abuse.

  There wasn’t a public phone anywhere nearby. I took this as an omen. I wasn’t meant to see Will. But where to go now?

  I cycled aimlessly, via the detached crescents and semidetached lanes and rows of terraces towards the town centre. But as I was coasting along Park Road I saw Ms Martin in yellow T-shirt and washed-out blue jeans painting her front door. I knew she lived in Park Road but hadn’t visited her there. She never invited any of us home, not even her Year 13 leavers, and of course we were all mad-curious to know what the inside of her house was like. If we quizzed her about it, she always said school was school and home was home, and her home was none of our business. Some of the chavs claimed to have spied through her front window, but as they gave different accounts of what they’d seen, I didn’t believe them. Izumi and I had gone there once when we knew Ms Martin was away, but we lost our nerve wh
en the next-door neighbour came out of her house just as we were getting off our bikes. We pretended to adjust our saddles and got the giggles while doing so, before scatting off.

  darkness: a mope

  darkness –

  your hand –

  light enough

  On breasts

  Beloved Will. You and breasts. Or, I mean, you and my breasts. I like it, I like it very much that you like them as much as you do. But yesterday, when you asked me to tell you about them – what it’s like to have breasts and what I think about my own and about breasts in general – I really didn’t feel like talking about them. I was enjoying what you were doing with them too much to talk about them. I know you, like most men, are obsessed by women’s breasts, I know you like feeling mine and sucking them, which I like you to do, and that when I show them to you they turn you on, and when they turn you on I’m turned on by seeing you turned on. But men are not alone in being fascinated by breasts. Women are also very interested in them. They are an endless topic of conversation among us. So I know breasts are very very important to us all. That’s why I promised to write the answers to your questions and here they are.

  Before I tell you about my breasts, I will tell you some facts about breasts in general which I think you should know.

  Part One: On breasts in general.

  Human breasts are not like breasts in any other mammal. For example, the breasts of our near relatives, the apes and chimpanzees, only swell when the female is lactating – giving milk for her babies. Even then, they do not swell very much. When the baby is weaned, the breasts disappear, the chest is flat again, and you can hardly see where the nipples are because they are hidden in the fur.

  In our human biology lessons, we were told that scientists

  As I stopped by her gate, it struck me that this was where I’d been headed all the time. How the mind keeps awkward facts from you till you’re ready for them. Had I thought I was on my way to Ms M.’s, I’d have turned back at once. Now I knew I needed to talk and that Ms Martin was the only person I could talk to. Because she knew me well, she knew Dad, she’d met Doris, and knew my family background, but wasn’t involved. Because I admired her and trusted her – I’d confided in her before, and she’d always kept it to herself. And also, to tell the truth, because I still had a bit of a crush on her, which I’d had since she first taught me in Year 9.

  ‘Ms Martin.’

  She looked over her shoulder, paintbrush suspended ready for the next stroke.

  ‘Cordelia!’

  ‘Hi!’

  ‘What are you doing in these parts?’

  ‘Just cycling around.’

  She turned back to her painting.

  ‘Congratulations on your results. Not so bad. Considering.’

  ‘Maths was rubbish.’

  ‘You gave up, I think.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Pity.’

  It was never any use making excuses to her. You might try it once, but her unspoken response was so withering you never tried it again, not if you cared what she thought about you.

  The door was half finished. Holly green. She was taking such care you’d have thought she was painting the Mona Lisa or the Sistine Chapel or some such masterpiece. One of the things I admired about her was that she did everything well.

  ‘Ms Martin?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Could I talk to you?’

  do not know why breasts in the human female grow and swell the way they do during adolescence and remain like that even when the female is not suckling children. Neither do they know why there are so many shapes and sizes. What purpose do breasts and their great variety serve in our evolution? What part do they play in our history and survival as a species? There are many guesses and theories, but no one has ever been able to demonstrate that their theory is the right one. Most scientists think the main purpose is to attract males, and that is why there are so many varieties – something for every taste and fancy. You, my Will, go for small pointy breasts like mine. But I know that many men, maybe even most men, prefer bigger boobs, which are round and full. (I know because of seeing which women and girls receive most attention from men and boys. I am a long way down the list.) Perhaps it is important to our evolution that there are as many different varieties of people as possible, so that there are always some of us who can adapt to any change or condition of the environment. When it comes to human survival, variety is the spice of life.

  However, breasts are fashion accessories also. And fashions change. My granddad Kenn thought Marilyn Monroe was the most beautiful and sexy woman on the planet. She had big boobs. My dad and many of his friends like smallish paps, which the supermodels of his youth in the sixties had. (I would have been a smash hit in those days.) My mother had small breasts and so does her sister, my aunt Doris. From my observations, I think bigger boobs are coming back into fashion again. Most of the boys in my year certainly go for them. They ogle and slaver over girls like Trudy Sims, who has very large tits and flaunts them, as do most of the chavs in her gang.

  (Being a male and easily deceived by our female wiles, you probably don’t know that many of the chavs stuff their bras to make their knockers look a lot bigger than they are. And

  ‘It’s holiday time.’

  ‘I know. But—’

  ‘I’ll be in school tomorrow to do some work for next term. Could it wait till then?’

  ‘It isn’t about school.’

  ‘O? Trouble with William?’

  ‘No. Well … I am a bit worried about him. He’ll be going away to college soon … But that isn’t the problem. We’ve just been camping, actually. Studying trees. He’s mad about trees. He’s going to tree college. They wanted him to go to Cambridge, but he chose tree college. Did you know?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘We went to see the Tortworth chestnut. Like a kind of pilgrimage. It’s his special tree. When he was about ten he spent a night sitting in its branches. He feels he was born that night. As his true self.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘D’you think that’s a bit weird?’

  Ms Martin stopped painting, laid her brush across the paint tin and turned to face me, rubbing her hands on a rag.

  ‘No, I don’t. Not at all, as a matter of fact. Do you?’

  ‘I think it’s beautiful.’

  ‘Has anything like that happened to you?’

  ‘No. I wish it had.’

  ‘Perhaps one day. I didn’t know that about William. How interesting! He’s a lovely boy. You’re lucky.’

  ‘I shouldn’t have told you. It’s a secret. You won’t say anything, will you?’

  ‘Promise.’

  ‘But I am a bit upset … Family trouble … Well … more than a bit.’

  She went back to her painting.

  ‘I’m not a social worker.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Nor a psychotherapist.’

  two of them have already had breast implants to achieve the ‘fuller look’, which I regard as obscene as well as a form of lying, and which Doris says they will regret because they are not yet mature, their bodies are still growing, and the operation will have to be done again quite soon and they will suffer pain. I said this to one of them the other day and received the gracious reply in the usual fortissimo, ‘No gain without pain, and what would you know anyway, idiot.’)

  The thing is, it doesn’t matter what size or shape of breasts women have, they all have the same amount of dairy equipment. A small-breasted woman produces as much milk as a large-breasted woman when feeding a baby. And when they are pregnant, women’s dugs put on about the same amount of weight whatever size they are to start with, which is why a small-breasted woman’s seem to grow more when pregnant than a large-breasted woman’s do.

  The average breast, when a woman is not pregnant or feeding a baby, weighs about 305 grams. About the same as a small melon. It is about ten centimetres across and about six and a half centimetres from the base to the
tip of the nipple.

  Obviously, breasts have two jobs. They have a mothering job as an open-all-hours mobile café for feeding babies. And they have a sex job to attract and please men.

  The mobile café job. Have you ever wondered why we belong to the group of animals called ‘mammals’? The answer is that we were given that name in the nineteenth century by Mr Carolus Linnaeus, a Swedish scientist who did a lot of cataloguing and naming of plants and animals. The word ‘mammal’ comes from ‘mamma’, which is Latin for ‘breast’ (which must be why children everywhere call their mother mamma, mam, ma, mom, mum, etc.). Therefore, all animals called mammals are ‘animals of the breast’. That is what they share in common, which other animals do not. (This includes

  ‘No … And I’m intruding … I’m sorry.’

  I tried to produce a grin-and-bear-it smile, but instead my face screwed up into something that must have resembled a squashed pear.

  I was about to push off, when she turned to me again, said, ‘Wait!’ and gave me a long look. Then, as if against her will, ‘All right. As it’s you.’