This is All by Aidan Chambers

Author:Aidan Chambers [Chambers, Aidan]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781407098364
Publisher: RHCP
Published: 2010-07-23T21:00:00+00:00

BOOK THREE

The Orange Pillow Box

1

AFTER WILL WENT to college I was depressed for weeks. At first we emailed and called each other every day. But gradually his emails became shorter and his calls less frequent. When I pointed this out he said college work kept him so busy he had very little time to himself. I knew he was always totally occupied by what he was doing, to the extent that he was almost one-track minded. I knew that his work with trees and his music meant everything to him. I knew he attended to the next thing he had to do and to nothing else, which meant if you weren’t right there, he could forget about you till something reminded him. I knew all this, I loved his dedication, but I felt he was drifting away and soon I’d lose sight and sound of him altogether. And all the time I feared someone else, some attractive tree girl, would turn up and seduce him.

I never knew till then how much I could miss someone. I read at that time, I don’t remember where, the sentence ‘Why is loss the measure of love?’ and knew that it was true.

To make things worse, soon after Will left, Dad and Doris were married with only a handful of guests as witnesses at a registry office ceremony that I thought unimaginative and soulless. Legal bureaucracy pronounced as a religious service with a jobbing lawyer as priest and my father and my aunt (my dead mother’s sister) going through soap-opera motions and saying paltry words for no other purpose than to obtain a piece of paper that gave legal respectability to what they’d been doing for months, if not years. When I said this to them, Doris replied, ‘It makes us feel better and that’s all that matters.’ I didn’t want to argue. But is feeling better what matters in a wedding? Surely there should be a lot more to it than that?

Ms Martin had already made me think more deeply about what I believed. She’d helped me to see how worn-out were the usual Christian practices, except perhaps for the few people who truly believed in them. Most people only went to church for baptisms and marriages and deaths because they needed a public demonstration of the high points of life. They didn’t believe in what was said and done. Ms Martin knew that from her years as a churchgoer; I’d heard about it from Will and his funeral stories. Not that I needed to be told; I’d seen it for myself. And it seemed to me as I watched Dad and Doris go through it that a registry office marriage was, as Granddad would have put it, neither nowt nor sommat – a piffling substitute, drained of life. I decided there and then that I would never accept such an empty ritual. If ever I got married the ceremony would have blood in it, have body and bone, a scrubbed fresh mind, a passionate soul, and express what I believed to be true.

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