‘Joe Kenn?’
‘I used to come here with him sometimes when I was little.’
‘You’re never George Kenn’s little lass?’
‘I am.’
‘Well I’ll be blowed! Haven’t seen you since you were bol-lock high to a grasshopper.’
All I’ve managed to pull on are my jeans and a T-shirt. The fog is damp. I’m sweaty. My T-shirt is clinging. I fold my arms behind my back to make my boobs stick out, and do what I can to look like an innocent cutesy. He eyes me again, appreciatively this time.
‘Grown a bit since then. Quite the young woman.’
‘Sixteen. Well, soon.’
‘Sixteen! Good God, how time flies! One last visit to your great-granpy’s grave, I suppose.’
‘With my boyfriend.’
‘Boyfriend, eh! Lucky chap.’
‘What d’you mean, one last visit?’
He taps the sign with a fist.
BLACKBIRD ESTATES
HIGH STYLE
OLD STYLE
NEW STYLE
HOMES
‘Builders start Monday.’ He turns back to the business of securing the sign. ‘Desirable country cottage. So they say. Going to introduce me, then, are you?’
‘But it’s a church.’
‘Was.’
‘And the graveyard?’
‘What about it?’
‘What’ll happen?’
‘Still consecrated. Can’t undo that. Against the law. But the gravestones are to come up. They’ll be stacked along the wall. Ground’ll be levelled and grassed. Access through the churchyard to the house.’
‘But the graves!’
‘All sorted by the church people. Lot of bloody red tape.’
He chucks his tools into the tractor, rubs the muck off his knotty hands with an even muckier piece of sacking. He’s a stubby little man, like a small bull in weary brown overalls. ‘Nothing in farming these days. Not a farm like mine. Too small. Foot and mouth, BSE, European rules and regs, one damn calamity after another. Had to sell. In hock to the bank. They decided. The old church, this field, all part of a new housing estate.’ He sniffs and snaps his head and sneers, ‘Commuters!’
‘But that’s awful!’
He leans back against the tractor’s wheel and eyes me again with frank pleasure. ‘I’ll not see it, thank God. Retiring. Bought a nice little place by the sea. I said to the wife, They can’t build country cottages for sodding commuters on the sea. Pardon my French. Though I wouldn’t put it past them to try.’
‘But destroying the graves so they can sell the church. I mean, that’s like selling the dead.’
‘Everything’s for sale these days, love. Nothing’s sacred any more. Except money. That’s God now. Money money money. Nobody cares a bugger about anything else. My French again.’
I thought of Granddad sitting beside Great-granddad’s grave, and reading out to me before I could read for myself the words on the headstone. One of my first lessons in reading, and my first book without pictures.
‘What about our headstone? What’ll happen to that?’
‘Stacked up against the wall with the others.’
‘But it’s ours. My family’s.’
‘True.’
‘I’m not leaving it here to be part of a wall.’
‘Quite right.’
‘Can we take it? I mean now.’
‘Nowt to do with me. I’ll not stop you.’
‘Right. I’ll get my boyfriend.’
‘It’ll need more than you and your boyfriend to lift that stone. They planted them to last in them days.’
‘Well, I’m not leaving it behind, even if it takes us all day. It belongs to us, and it means a lot to me, because of my granddad and everything. It just isn’t right to leave it where nobody cares about it. You do understand, don’t you, Mr Tenbray?’
‘Now don’t you get your pretty self in a swivet.’
I gave him a long look. His eyes were full of naughty thoughts. I gyrated a bit, pretending agitation.
He grinned at me. ‘What you need, my dear, is a tractor.’
‘O – right,’ I said, sweet as honey, and pretended to let that thought settle before adding, ‘I don’t suppose …? Could we borrow yours?’
‘Well now, trouble is, nobody drives my tractor but me.’
‘So …?’
He chuckled. ‘Why not. Tell you what. You fetch your boyfriend. If he’s a handy lad, we’ll have the job done in no time.’
‘His name’s William. And he’s very handy. Thanks, Mr Tenbray. You’re a sweety.’
I gave him a peck of a kiss on his chubby ruddy prickly cheek that smelt of cows.
He leered a sheepish grin and blushed. ‘Aye well, that’s as maybe. But mind you,’ he says, tapping his nose. ‘Mum’s the word.’
Post saga
The journey home after dark.
The fog had lifted. Showers of light rain fell.
Digging up Great-grandpa’s headstone had taken longer and was harder work than I’d expected. By the time we’d done it and lugged the headstone into the boot of the car, we were covered in mud and whacked out. One of my least favourite garbs is sweaty clothes when I’ve cooled off and the sweat is cold. And I’d broken the nails of some fingers while struggling with the stone, which I hate. No surprise then, that as soon as we’d driven away from St George’s and had settled into our journey and the adrenaline had evaporated, my emotions took a dive. I was so keen to wash and change that the journey seemed endless.
The anti-climax of return compounded by the anti-climax of first sex. I stared ahead, wishing the minutes and the miles away.
Return journeys. Choose your preference from the following (or all of them if you like, as all of them are applicable):
All return journeys are a:
retrieval rewinding recovery
restoration revision reminder
retrospective re-presentation reprise
le temps retrouvé
I remembered the day before, when I’d told Will that I wanted sex with him not only for sex but because it would help us go where we had to go together, but that I didn’t know where that was. Had I found out? Sure, I knew something had happened. I didn’t feel the same about myself or about Will. But I didn’t know in what ways. Except that I’d lost something. At school, Ms Martin was always quoting at us, ‘Every time we learn something, we suffer a sense of loss.’ So I must have arrived somewhere and learned something. But I felt I’d been blindfolded, unable to see where we’d been and where we were now. I felt dissatisfied, let down, disappointed, and weepy. I could still feel Will inside me. I was a little sore. But I wanted him inside me again, as if we hadn’t finished yet, that more had to be done before we’d complete what we’d set out to do.
‘Will,’ I said after a while, ‘are you okay?’
‘Yes.’
‘You lie.’
‘And you?’
‘I lie too.’
Another mile in silence.
‘Want to talk about it?’
‘Rather have a pizza.’
‘I’d rather get home. We can pick one up and eat at my place. Yes? I really need to get home.’
He said nothing. But started singing, just loudly enough above the blur of the car and the noise of the road for me to make out the words. It took me a moment to realise he was singing the first song I’d written for him.
There’s no one more unlikely, No one meant to be, There’s no one more unlikely Who’s only meant for me.
My words and his music making our song.
You’re everything I don’t know about, You’re a whole new world to see. There’s no one more unlikely Who’s only meant for me.
Is that what my mental blindfold was preventing me from seeing, a whole new world that was mine? Was I a whole new world for Will? Did I belong to him and did he belong to me?
I was too tired, too lost, to think about it.
I closed my eyes and reste
d in the embrace of his voice.
And in love of him.
Does all food, no matter how poor, taste good when you’re really hungry? I’d complained often enough about the pizzas from the takeaway near home when Dad had bought them because neither he nor his latest woman could bother to cook for us, and they wouldn’t let me. (His women often seemed to feel threatened if I did the cooking – unlike Doris, who was only too glad to let me get on with it.) But that evening they tasted like manna.
Manna. What does real manna taste like, by the way? It’s supposed to be the food of the gods. But which gods? And what food do they like? According to my Collins Eng. dic., manna is ‘a sweet substance obtained from various plants, esp. from the flowering ash tree’. Will would like it, then. But in that case, the pizza from our local shop was definitely not manna. There was nothing Italian about it either, as I can testify, having eaten real pizza in Italy, which is sublime, and therefore might be food of the gods – or at least, of the pizza gods.
Not that we lingered. Rather, bolted the pizza, washing it down with Coke. Two junkies, stuffing our stomachs with ersatz Italian Cm(H)n – according to Will, the formula for carbohydrate – and sluicing them with American teeth-and-gut rot while grinning at each other in gastronomic guilt.
Revived by caffeine and a sugar rush, we unloaded the Kenn family memorial, leaving it in the garage until I could decide where it should go. (It ended up under the apple tree in Doris’s garden, where I hope you can still see it.) Then we agreed I’d use the bathroom while Will unloaded the rest of my stuff from the car, after which he’d have a shower before heading for home.
Will came to my room after his shower. I hadn’t seen him since our meal. He stood in the doorway, looking at me. He had nothing on, only a hand towel wrapped round his middle like a mini-skirt. I was sitting on the end of my bed, repairing my nails, wearing only an XL T-shirt. His skin glowed. His eyes shone. His hair, still wet, sculpted his head. I wanted him so much I couldn’t speak or move. Desire can be spellbinding.
Found mope
rapture
ground in flesh
beauties the body
He waited till he was sure. Then came to me and deliberately and with forethought took my face gently in his warm still damp hands and kissed me.
Kissing. You know by now how important kissing was to both of us and how much we liked it. We knew our preferences and our moves. We knew the dynamics of our score: when soft, when hard, when short, when long, when slurred, when staccato, when tongued, when only lipped, when open-mouthed, when closed, when held lips-to-lips without movement, when to bite, when to suck, when upper-lip to under-lip, when under-lip to upper-lip, when to breathe and when to hold our breath. We knew our rhythms, and our tempo, we knew our signs for intervals and for cadenzas. It was an art we revelled in and strove to perfect.
We’d talked about why kissing was so special to us and why it’s different from all other aspects of love-making. We knew that whenever we met after however brief a parting it wasn’t until we’d kissed and kissed enough that we felt connected and at peace with each other again. If we couldn’t reconnect with our ritual of kissing because of where we were or who was around, we felt awkward with each other, out of sync, out of harmony. Kissing was the way we tuned ourselves to the same key. For us, kissing was as much a way of talking to each other as words were. And sometimes, when words failed us, we could say with kisses what we couldn’t say with words.
Old Shakes, as usual, summed it up best (in Troilus and Cressida, IV, 5, 36):
In kissing, do you render or receive?
Both take and give.
And according to Herr Schmidt, these were his uses of the lovely verb ‘to kiss’:
to touch with the lips in love or respect
to salute or caress each other by joining lips
to meet
to join.
That evening we took and gave for so long that we forgot time and ourselves. And sometime in that untimed time, Will lost his towel and relieved me of my T-shirt so that the skin of our bodies could everywhere touch with love and respect, salute and caress each other, and meet and join as nakedly as our lips.
We were still beginners at this all-inclusive art, novices in this holy rite, newcomers to this paradise, but however inexpert, however inept we were, that night will always be one of the happiest, most blissful, most vividly remembered, most innocent and beautiful of my life.
When I woke early in the morning, Will lying on his tummy still deeply asleep beside me, I looked around my room full of my childhood treasures and knew I’d been right to think that taking Will into me would be the end of my childhood. It may be, I thought then, as Ms Martin says, that every time we learn something, we suffer a sense of loss. But now I know that it’s also true that every time we learn something we gain more knowledge of ourselves. And what, I told myself again, is life about if it’s not about knowing ourselves?
I gazed at Will. Because of him, I thought, because of loving him and him loving me, I have learned this.
He stirred, turned onto his back, opened his eyes and saw me gazing at him. He smiled a sleepy smile and snuggled up. I cuddled him as if he were a baby. And we fell asleep wrapped together again.
I wish we could have gone on like that for ever. But life isn’t so accommodating. We couldn’t and we didn’t.
The Green Pillow Box of BOOK TWO
Some beautiful things
(when I was sixteen)
THE BARE BRANCHES of a large tree silhouetted on the horizon against a cloudless evening sky in winter.
The inside of the elbow of someone who is physically attractive. (Will’s. I always want to kiss it, and often do.)
A new pencil when I begin to write with it. The feel between my fingers, the smell of the wood when I sharpen it with my special slim little chromium-plated penknife, the sound and feel as it writes on the page.
A kitchen in which everything is exactly as I want it, with shining pans of many sizes and stimulating knives and enticing utensils and aromatic herbs and exotic ingredients arranged so that they are just where you need them, and fruit in large bowls and vegetables in wire containers and strings of garlic and onions hanging in a corner, and two shining sinks, and a large hob and oven with interesting knobs and dials, and cupboards and drawers made of plain light wood, and a wide window looking out onto a plenteous garden. (I wish.)
A well-produced new book: the look, the smell, the sound, the feel of it in my hands as I open it for the first time. In my opinion, a well-made book is the most beautiful and user-friendly object ever made by human beings.
Izumi’s long straight ebony black hair, framing her face and hanging down her back and styled and cut to perfection. She purrs like a cat as I brush it for her, which is also beautiful and rather erotic.
BOOK TWO of The Green Pillow Box
‘We’ve something to tell you,’ Dad said one day in the summer nine months after Will’s and my sex saga. He was sitting with Doris in the garden of Doris’s house, under the apple tree where I had danced with my two best friends when I was eight and where Great-granddad’s headstone was now planted.
Will and I had been to see the great yew at Ashbrittle in Somerset, the largest yew tree in England, three thousand years old and more than twelve metres round. It had been a three-day trip to celebrate Will’s four A-level results (all As) and my GCSEs (four A-stars, three As, one B, and one C). We’d camped in a tent. On the way we’d visited the Tortworth chestnut again to commemorate Will’s epiphany as a tree-boy, and on the way back we stopped off in Bath to see a production of The Tempest at the Theatre Royal so I could pay homage to the other Will in my life.
From leaving to returning we enjoyed one of those carefree unblemished times when everything seems destined to be exactly right. Will and I were at one, the previous weeks of worry and torment forgotten, and the world conspired to please us. Will and I made love twice each night and once in the day. There’s nothing m
ore beautiful than making love outside in the country, and especially at night beneath a glowing moon.
During the day Will studied the trees, photographing them and making notes, while I wrote mopes and read. I also wrote another lyric for Will’s band. He asked for a melancholy song about lost love, because that was always popular. It came
When a boy you love quietly cries because he’s so moved by something beautiful.
Daffodils in the dusk. They glow as if from an inner light.
Daffodils at any time, because they are brave.
Who am I writing to?
When I’m writing in my pillow book like now, who am I writing to? I don’t think I’m writing to myself. I mean, I already know what I’m writing about, so why bother to write it to myself?
Am I writing to myself in years to come, when I’m a lot older and have started to forget and need to be reminded of how I used to be? Probably. But that’s not all. For I do feel I’m writing to someone and for someone who is here right now. Perhaps the self who writes is writing to, and writing for, one or more of my other selves. Maybe my readers are my other selves.
Also, maybe the self who is writing is not always the same self, but might be any one of my other selves? This would explain why my writing isn’t always the same in style, not always the same in the way I express what I want to say and the things I write about.
The self who is writing each time is the self who needs to say something, and the self who is being written to is the self who needs to read it.
This must be how I tell myself about myself.
This must be how I find out about myself.
This must be why writing is so important to me. And my poems are the most important because they tell me more about myself than anything else. They are my best way of telling me not just about myself but about everything.
I read my selves
for I am Myself
easily, like doing a crossword puzzle just for fun. I was quite unaffected by it, had no inkling that it forecast a dark cloud rising over the horizon of our happiness. You can’t see clouds when your eyes are facing the sun.