This Is All

by Aidan Chambers

  I buried myself in the menu, like an actor with stage fright trying to hide behind an insufficient piece of scenery. The list of Mariolatrous food was a blur. The waiter was spieling the specials. I couldn’t take in anything he said. Receiving no encouragement from Will or me, he left us to make up our minds. I squinted at the blurred print till I could nerve myself to glance at Will. His menu was closed on the table and he was toying with his bread knife. I felt miserable, for him more than for myself, having spoilt his last meal on his last night before we parted. I wanted to hug him and tell him how sorry I was.

  women anyway. So if he has to be a he or a she he should be a she.’

  ‘As it happens,’ Old Vic replied, ‘you’re not the first person to think that.’

  And he gave her a book to read as part of her preparation, Revelations of Divine Love by Mother Julian of Norwich. From it Ms M. learned that Mother Julian wasn’t a mother at all, but was a ‘mother of the church’, in the way some priests like Old Vic are called father. She was a holy woman, an anchorite – a kind of hermit nun – who lived around 1373 in Norwich. She had dedicated her life to God, lived completely alone, and only spoke to other people when it was absolutely necessary. For a few days in 1373 she experienced a number of ‘visions’, which she said were given to her by God. These visions revealed that God was female as well as male and so was Jesus Christ. And from that time she called God ‘She’ and said that God was her Mother. She said motherhood means kindness, wisdom, knowledge, goodness and love.

  (I hope I can live up to this description.)

  When she read this, Ms M.’s heart missed a beat. Not only because it put into words something she felt was true but for another reason also.

  You see, she told me, her first name, the name her parents gave her, was Sarah. But even as a small child, she had never liked it. It didn’t seem to be her. So when she was about eleven she decided to give herself a name she did like, and told everyone to call her Julie. Only her father refused; he still called her Sarah. She couldn’t remember exactly why she chose Julie, except that it felt right. But when she read what St Julian said about God being female as well as male, she was sure the name she had chosen five years before felt right because it was an omen, a kind of prophecy that her life would be given to God, and that her special saint was St Julian. She said it was the same as someone knowing they must become a doctor or an artist or a musician or whatever.

  I managed to say, trying to sound cheerful rather than defeated, ‘We could try somewhere else.’

  He shook his head once, staccato.

  I said with an effort, ‘I’m sorry. Got it wrong.’

  ‘Right idea, wrong place.’

  ‘I should have asked you.’

  He looked at me, shrugged, elbows on the table, and said, ‘Let’s eat.’

  I was grateful to him for not blaming me or sulking or sniping. But that only made me feel even more of a failure. I forced myself to rehearse in my head one of my Realisations: When someone is about to leave you for a while, they get scratchy. This is only to help them leave.

  Will opened his menu and said with brisk cheeriness, ‘What d’you think? Meat, fish, or the special tonight, moddom? You’re paying, you should choose.’

  I cheeried back, ‘No, monsewer, it’s your treat, you choose. And Dad has helped so don’t stint.’

  ‘Ah, in that case!’ He sounded even more like a soap. ‘They have lobster. You love lobster, I love lobster, they can’t gussy up lobster au naturel, so let’s have lobster.’

  ‘With salad.’

  ‘And sorbet after and nothing before, because lobster is always more filling than you think it will be. They do good sorbet here.’

  ‘Okay, done. But I thought you didn’t like this place. So how d’you know about the sorbet?’

  ‘Because—’

  ‘Your mother—’

  ‘Likes it,’ we both said and smiled. We were together again, and I wanted to hug him and kiss him for being Will and not bearing grudges.

  ‘There’s one of her whatyoucallthem, clients at the table over there.’

  I turned, following his eyes. A couple three tables away.

  It was her vocation. Only this was different; she had made the decision without being conscious that it had been made.

  The Big Bang. For the next few years, until she was nineteen, Ms M. learned all she could about religion, became a key member of St James’s, helped Old Vic every day with Matins, Mass (aka Holy Communion and the Eucharist), and Evensong. She visited sick parishioners, taught Junior Church (about fifteen five- to ten-year-olds), assisted with the Youth Group (a few bored early teens who just wanted something to do once a week), worked with the editor of the parish magazine, keeping lists of services and other activities up to date. People like Mrs Topping took to calling her ‘the vicar’s secretary’ (not without a hint of raised eyebrow), because Old Vic relied on her more and more.

  (I remember thinking guiltily at this point in her story that Ms M. might be a bit of a crank after all. That she might really be a bit weird, as the chavs said she was. I couldn’t imagine myself spending most of my spare time drudging for some ageing clergyman along with a covey of old trouts.)

  She became so keen that a year after her confirmation she decided to leave school and devote as much time as possible to her spiritual life and her parish work. To pay her way and be independent of her parents she took a part-time job as a receptionist at a local health centre. Her father went ape. To think that his daughter, the apple of his eye, could throw away the advantages of a good education and a university degree for beliefs he despised and do odd jobs for a useless vicar! What made it worse was that she announced at the same time that she intended to ‘devote her life to God’ – though she wasn’t sure how yet. Her mother wept as if there’d been a death in the family. Her father refused to speak to her for weeks. But this only made her more determined, as total opposition from a possessive parent often does.

  Ms M. decided to give herself a year to find out ‘what God

  ‘I can see that from her frock,’ I said.

  The woman, seeing us looking, gave Will a coy wave.

  ‘Mister Edward Malcolm and his lady wife,’ Will said.

  ‘I expect she was pretty when she was young.’

  ‘Meow meow!’

  ‘But he’s quite dishy. If you’ll pardon my restaurant lexis.’ And he was. He could have been Will twenty years on. And, I thought, if Will looks like that twenty years from now I shan’t mind at all.

  ‘He’s in sewage,’ Will said.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘He’s some kind of engineer who specialises in sewage. In water actually, but including sewage.’

  ‘Are you trying to put me off my lobster?’

  ‘No. But off him maybe.’

  ‘No competition.’

  ‘Should hope not. Far too old.’

  ‘Yes, too old,’ I said, lying only a little. ‘And I suppose someone has to. Specialise in getting rid of sewage, I mean. Or we’d be drowning in doo-doo.’

  ‘True. But think of having a lover in shit.’

  ‘Elegantly put.’ I gave him an arch look. ‘Like your dad and dead bodies. That’s not much different, is it? Someone has to specialise in getting rid of the dear departed or we’d be—’

  ‘I’ve got the picture, thank you.’

  ‘And lobsters you might recall, dear Will, are also specialists in sewage. Scavengers on the sea bed, aren’t they?’

  ‘What, you mean they’re the cockroaches of the sea?’

  ‘I rather wish you hadn’t said that.’

  ‘Why? You like fish. Fish eat worms that have fed on the sea bed, which is mainly sewage of one kind and another. You like meat. Cows and sheep eat grass that grows in soil, which is simply dead grass and other vegetation mixed with dead animals and animal droppings that’ve rotted down. You like

  wanted me to do’. Old Vic mooted the possibility of her becoming a priest. She
thought she might, until some Anglican nuns visited the church during a mission week. She enjoyed being with them so much and was so interested in all they told her about their way of life that she visited them at their convent to find out more. By the end of her stay she felt that theirs was the right kind of religious life for her. But Old Vic advised caution. Look around, he told her. There were other communities, other kinds of nuns whose way of life might suit her better.

  Which is what she did. There weren’t many to look at. The more she saw the surer she became that she was meant for a religious life. But the problem was that the more she saw the less any of them seemed right. One was so old-fashioned and stuffy she felt the nuns (few and old) were suffocating to death. Another (also few but not so old) was more like a group of social workers, who happened to live together, than a community of nuns. The nuns she had first met were lively and not a bit stuffy. Ms M. visited them again a number of times for as long as two or three weeks at a time, but she sensed there was something – she couldn’t quite put her finger on what – that put her off. What she was looking for was a community that lived and worked together in the way she thought nuns should but which also understood the modern world and had adapted itself to the changes in women’s lives. (At the time, she couldn’t express it better than that.)

  And so the months passed, her year out of school went by and still she didn’t know what to do. Until, on her nineteenth birthday, the Big Bang solved her dilemma.

  To celebrate her birthday Ms M. took a male friend with her on a pilgrimage to Norwich where Mother Julian lived when she had her divine revelations. They set off after work in Ms M.’s old mini and camped overnight just outside Cambridge, intending to drive the last leg of the journey early the next morning so as to give themselves a whole day

  salad, well, lettuce and tomatoes and celery and you name it, it’s all the same, they grow on what is in effect recycled sewage. My dad digs horse shit into his potato patch to make the soil rich enough to grow succulent spuds. In fact, the whole world is just one great big organic recycling plant. The entire universe, come to that. Haven’t you understood that yet? Everything, including you and me and everybody, is made out of our rotted-down animal and vegetable predecessors. But I still wouldn’t want a lover who’s in sewage.’

  Scratchy scratchy.

  ‘I do understand about the recycling. I think I might have heard you on that theme before. Probably more than once. All I meant was, I was sorry you compared lobster to – oh, forget it.’

  Scratchy scratchy.

  At which point, thank heaven, the waiter arrived to take our order.

  ‘We’ll have the cockroaches,’ Will deadpanned, ‘au naturel.’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir?’

  I put my foot up, under the table, between his legs—

  ‘Don’t tell us they’re off.’

  – and pressed a warning. He coughed and gulped.

  ‘Cockroaches, sir?’

  ‘Did I say cockroaches? Sorry. We were just discussing how—’ I gave my toe a firm twist. Cough cough, and, ‘Sorry! … Sorry. Crossed wires. I meant lobster. Naturally.’

  ‘Au naturel, of course, sir, naturally,’ said the waiter. ‘Anything with it?’

  ‘A salad,’ said Will.

  The waiter fluttered off.

  ‘You shouldn’t be ordering,’ I said. ‘You’re my guest.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Will said. ‘Forgot.’

  I had that feeling again of being a lot older.

  I said, ‘You didn’t order any wine.’ And couldn’t help thinking, Lordy, I sound just like his mother. Yuk!

  – the day of her birthday – to look round Norwich, before driving home late that night. But when they set off they were held up by a road block. There had been an explosion, the police had cordoned off the area, and inside the cordon a badly injured man was lying in the road. No one was tending him because the police feared he was a suicide bomber who might still have explosives strapped to him, which had not gone off. But the man was moaning in agony. Ms M. couldn’t bear to do nothing. She broke through the cordon and ran to the man, but as she bent over him a small explosive went off, which killed him and injured Ms M.

  She was in hospital for weeks. For a time it was feared that the explosion might have blinded her. Her eyes were bandaged for days. Eventually the doctors decided it was safe to uncover them. They did this in a darkened room. To everyone’s relief, her eyes were all right. The light was gradually increased as her eyes got accustomed, and at last the blinds were drawn from the window and she could look out at the grounds of the hospital. What she saw was a field of roughly cut grass, a pond in the middle, a big old chestnut tree beside the pond, and a high mellow brick wall hiding the main road beyond the field. Above that the sky. Nothing else.

  What happened to her at that moment was another revelation, another godspell, another ‘epiphany’, like the ones in St James’s. The same day she described it in a letter to the friend who had been with her on her pilgrimage. Later, the friend gave her a copy of the letter. This is part of it:

  As I lay here looking so hard and so long, I began to see everything was perfectly itself. The grass was perfectly grass, and the pond perfectly a pond, and the water in it perfectly water, and the tree so perfectly a tree. And the light! Oh, the light! It was so perfectly itself too, perfectly light, and yet also perfectly everything else. Because without the light I couldn’t have seen anything. It illuminated everything. Made everything visible. Made everything there.

  ‘But he didn’t ask.’

  ‘Excuses, excuses. Deliberately, I should think. To get his own back.’ Yuk! again.

  ‘You put the boot into the wrong person.’

  Trying to be light: ‘How easily you’re roused.’ And failing.

  ‘By you or by him?’

  If at first you don’t succeed. ‘He doesn’t fancy you the way I do.’

  ‘And he doesn’t fancy you the way I do.’

  I couldn’t help Little C blurting out, ‘But what about when you’re at college?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘And you see someone you fancy. It’s bound to happen.’

  ‘Is it? Not to me.’

  ‘Certain sure?’

  ‘Nothing’s ever that certain.’

  ‘There you are, then.’

  ‘Don’t you trust me?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, sharper than I meant, ‘but I don’t trust tree girls. Who are very good at climbing all over tree boys, I expect.’

  ‘Virginia creepers.’

  ‘Is that what they’re called?’

  ‘So I was told.’

  Acid really had entered the soul by now. ‘The virgin bit won’t apply for long, then. Even if it does to start with. Or did I hear wrong? Was that vagina creepers perhaps?’

  ‘Meow!’

  ‘And it won’t be just the girls. What about boys who climb all over girls? What’s the male of the species called?’

  ‘Woodpeckers.’

  ‘Very droll.’

  We disconnected, annoyed with each other. I looked around. Everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves. Glanced at Will to see what he was doing. Looking straight at me. The eyes that always undid me.

  And I thought: Yes, the light made everything visible that is there. But it also made everything. Without the light nothing would exist. The grass, the pond, the water, the tree are all light, only light. Their perfection is made by the light. …

  As I watched, the sunlight played on the ripples of the water and flickered on the leaves of the tree as they moved in the breeze. And the light broke up into thousands of individual flecks. But I knew they all came from the same source. They were all, each fleck, perfect sunlight, and were also all the same thing, the Sun. They came from the Sun and go back to the Sun and are the Sun now while they are flecks of light on the water.

  The light reveals the water so we can see it, and the ripples of water reveal the flecks of sunlight so that we can see in them perfect i
ndividual particles of the Sun. They don’t blind us if we look at them, though we would be blinded if we looked at them all together in the perfect Sun.

  And I knew that this is how it is with us and how it is with God. We are perfectly what we are, as the flecks of sunlight are perfectly flecks of Sun. And we are individual particles of God who we come from and are already all the time, now, here, every day. The flecks of light don’t go looking for the Sun. They are the Sun. In themselves and all together. And we don’t need to go looking for God. We are God, in ourselves and all together.

  I expected Ms M. to tell me that this experience strengthened her Christian faith. But it didn’t. Just the opposite. It caused her to give it up. That’s how she put it. She didn’t say she lost her faith, but that she gave it up.

  I asked her why. She told me that in the following weeks, as she recovered from her injuries, she reviewed her belief. And for the first time she ‘saw through it’. It was as if the recovery of her sight had opened her eyes to her faith – what her faith really was – for the first time.

  And what did she see? I asked.

  The main thing was this. She could accept the story of Christ as a story. She could see it was full of truths about

  ‘Pax?’ he said, making an effort. His oboe voice.

  ‘Pax.’ I smiled love at him.

  We changed the subject: The music we were practising together. His band (he was fed up with it, had outgrown it, had had enough of that kind of thing, and had decided to give it up). Some gossip about a mutual friend.

  The food arrived. Neither of us could face ordering wine.

  I shouldn’t have had the lobster, not because of our conversation but because it’s so messy to eat and I wasn’t dressed for mess. The waiter made a drama of kitting me out in a special lobster apron that made me look like an overgrown three-year-old, which drew glances and chuckles from the now full restaurant. This reignited Will’s scratchiness. He refused his apron with a vexed shake of his head.