This Is All (31 page)

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 when 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.’

As it’s you
. The squashed pear blushed.

How dangerously intoxicating is one small sign that we are chosen. How much we all want to be special, singled out, preferred, by someone we wish would love us.

Ms Martin moved the paint tin, and stood aside.

‘Go in. Mind the paint. Sit yourself down. I’d better finish this or it’ll dry patchy.’

A little apron of stone flags no more than a metre wide was separated from the pavement by a low brick wall. You came through the front door directly into the front room. I went inside with eyes agog.

Ms Martin’s house was one of those two-up, two-down terrace houses built for the families of manual workers somewhere around the 1920s and often now done up by middle-class singles. The rooms were small and square with a staircase between the front room and the back kitchen. A bathroom had been added on behind the kitchen sometime in the 1950s and beyond that was a narrow garden divided from its neighbours by high wooden fences. Ms Martin’s garden was all lawn. An old crab-apple tree leaned against the end fence, where there was a gate into a back lane. A wooden garden table and two chairs were in the shade of the tree.

I suppose you could say the house was furnished in the minimalist style. Ms Martin called it ‘essentialist’. I knew from the way she was at school that she couldn’t bear clutter and, she told me later, when I found out about the rest of the house, that she wanted cleaning to occupy as little time as possible, not out of laziness but because she had more to do

males, as you have noticed, Will, enjoying it as you do when I play with your nipples and lick them. In fact, you only have to observe older men in summer, when they insist on wearing totally inappropriate clothing such as tight T-shirts or, even worse, go topless, yuk yuk, that many of them have bigger and certainly flabbier boobs than many women.) It might also interest you to know that it was Mr Linnaeus who gave human beings the name
homo sapiens
, which means ‘man of wisdom’. This seems to me to be erroneous, as it excludes half the human race. I suppose he thought that women are not wise, though all the evidence suggests exactly the opposite is true, and therefore it would be better to call us
femina sapiens
, seeing that men have a female gene in their biological make-up, whereas women have only female genes.

The sex job
. I needn’t go into this here. You already know as much about it as me.

Breasts are the only part of the female anatomy that combines both roles.

Men are so fascinated by papilla because every man wants to be sexually excited and satisfied and also wants to be mothered and coddled and pampered as if he were still a child (which most of them are, to judge by their behaviour). But they do not usually want both of these at the same time. Which is why, in my opinion, so many of them who are married have girlfriends or go to prostitutes. Being men, and therefore incapable of thinking of two different things and doing two different things at the same time, the only way they can handle their basic animal desires is to have one woman to mother them and one for sex. I have noticed this tendency in Dad, who uses Doris like a mother, to look after him, and dates tarty types for fun and sex.

I discussed this subject with Ms M. today. She pointed out that obsession with the sexual attraction of breasts is a feature of developed Westernised cultures, whereas in most African

with her time than move dust about. ‘Whenever I’m cleaning,’ she said, ‘I can’t help thinking of how much time it’s taking away from reading.’

The front room had a blond-wood floor with a dark blue scatter rug in the middle. A dark blue squashy-comfortable two-seater sofa was on one side of the fireplace against the wall opposite the window, a thin-stemmed reading lamp angled by its side. On the other side of the fireplace was one of those Scandinavian wood-and-leather lounger chairs you can alter from alert sit-up-and-beg to lie-back day-bed. It also had its own adjustable reading lamp sitting on a small table. The alcoves on either side of the chimney were fitted with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, painted white, which were chock-full of books. In the corner behind the chair was a large-screen tv with DVD and sound system underneath.