This Is All Read Online Free Page B

evocative these may be. I like poetry so much because for me it resurrects life and remakes the world.
    *
    Let’s have a fermata, a pause for a change of air. Here’s a passage of the kind I was writing in my pillow book around the time I fell for Will. (I’ll give us changes of air like this when I feel we need them as my story progresses.)
    A-whoring
    I don’t go a-whoring. But I might. One day, I might. One night. For the fun of it. The excitement. The risk. The danger. Just to try it. Just to see what it’s like.
    But of course I won’t. Still. A-whoring. On the streets. At night. In the dark glow of back-street lights. On the corner. In a whore dress. Tight top. Short black-leather mini-skirt. Slinky broad-mesh black stockings. A wig of long blonde hair. Loads of make-up.
    I’ll drawl to passing men, ‘Looking for business?’
    They’ll ask, ‘How much? Have you somewhere to go?’
    To go a-whoring.
    Moonshine.
    Where do such fantasies come from, such desires, such temptations? Is there an instinct in us all, everybody, us girls anyway, to go a-whoring?
    And by whose lights a-whoring? Whose word a-whoring? A-hunting for a mate maybe. A vestigial urge of the virgin.
    Or like the girl, young woman actually, in Bangkok I saw on tv the other night. A man, an Australian journalist with a camcorder taking time out from his job, picked her up in a whore-bar, but didn’t want her for sex (so he said ) but because he liked the look of her and wanted to be with her and talk to her.
    Of course he asked her why she went a-whoring, the way men do, as if they didn’t know and weren’t a-whoring themselves when they ask it. She said her family in the country was very poor and needed money to pay for their little house and bit of only-just-enough land to live on, so that house andland could not be taken from them by a greedy landlord. She had come to the city, never having been before, an innocent virgin, to earn the money her family needed, and whoring was the only work she could find.
    The Ozzy journalist befriended her, went with her to meet her family. And then said he would give her the money they needed (little enough by Ozzy-Western standards) if she would give up whoring and stay with her parents. She said she would. He gave her the money and went back to Oz.
    But he couldn’t get her out of his mind. Was haunted by her. Believed he was in love with her. So he returned a year later. But she wasn’t with her family. She had gone back to Bangkok. He searched till he found her. She was working in a worse whorehouse than before. And when he asked her why she had gone a-whoring again, having promised that she wouldn’t, she said, ‘Because it is my fate.’
    Is there such a thing as fate?
    I want to be unfated. I want to be an unfettered free spirit. But if fate means something inevitable, something required, something that you must do because you cannot escape it, then I know it is not my fate to go a-whoring, but it is my fate to put words on paper.
    Sausage fingers
    If I hadn’t fallen for Will I suppose I’d have got on with things – meaning sex – much faster. As it was, I became so anxious not to put him off by coming on too strong, and not to lose him by seeming too gauche and uncool, that I went into extreme fem mode and waited for him to make the next move. Which seemed like waiting for a rock to roll itself uphill.
    A week went by, eight days to be exact, before he bestirred himself, by which time I was in despair and also ready to chop him into little pieces. Then he sent an email.
    again? my place after school thursday? wb
    You could never accuse Will of loquacity.
    We cycled to his house, detached, just off the common, great view across the Golden Valley, very spick-and-span. No one in.
    Hopes fluttered. Please let him have more than music in mind.
    Coffee and bickies in bright and shiny all mod cons kitchen.
    Like to taste my lips? No such luck.
    Off to big L-shaped sitting room. Comfy slumpy