This Is All Read Free

airyunusual quality, and singing. He had a gravelly yet light voice that made the soles of my feet tingle.
    He didn’t regard reading a book just for the sake of it as nerdy; reading has always been one of my greatest passions.
    As much as anything what mattered was that he made me laugh. Because he was gifted with a dry, oblique, deadpan sense of humour, before people got to know him they often wondered whether he was being funny or snide. This made many among the ancientry as well as his peers uneasy. Most of our teachers were wary of him. They weren’t quite sure whether he was winding them up or not. Intellectual cleverness is often distrusted by those who don’t possess it. Add ambiguity and you add fear. Will mixed both. But once you got to know him you learned that his humour was as conscious and intended as any can be. The trouble was, he didn’t make any concessions to people who hadn’t the wit to catch on. Not that he didn’t notice; he just didn’t care whether they caught on or not. The only way to take him therefore was straight and undiluted. And I liked that about him. It challenged me to be more than I thought I could be.
    Finally in this list of qualifications, I chose Will because he wanted everything to be right. For him, good enough was never good enough, only perfect would do. Naturally, this meant he could be infuriating. The boys in his band sometimes fell out with him and left because he was never satisfied with their playing or his own. But they always came back because without him they did nothing and got nowhere.
    His perfectionism also meant he frequently thought he was a failure, which in turn meant he was never completely happy. And this belief, this assumption, was Will’s biggest weakness. He sometimes needed reassurance, encouragement, solace, but would never ask for it or even show that he needed it. Of course, I didn’t know this about him at first. When I picked him out for my devirgining he seemed the most self-confident person I’d ever met.
    … and Sex
    If music be the food of love, as the great god Shakespeare says, and as William Blacklin likes music so much, then, me thought, I’ll capture my chosen one by feeding music to him.
    But before I could feed him, I had to cook up a menu to entice him to the meal. A few minutes’ Netsearch turned up a neat little recipe for piano and oboe: Three Romances by Schumann. To be honest it was a grade or two beyond my capacity. But I thought this might be an advantage, because my poor playing compared with his would bolster his male pride. Besides, there wasn’t much to choose from, certainly not in my range of pianistic accomplishment, music for piano and oboe not being exactly thick on the ground, so this one would have to serve as bait with which to catch my Willy. And he took it.
    Was I so calculating? Was I so embarrassingly brash? Was I so arrogant that I hadn’t one hint of doubt, one twinge of worry that well-favoured Will might find me less than his delight?
    Well, I have horse’s-mouth evidence to help answer those questions. Here’s what I wrote in my pillow book the day I set my trap:
    Just sent WB an em.
    hi. i’m learning the piano part of schumann’s 3 romances, op 94, for piano and oboe, and need to try it with the oboe. any chance of trying it with you? cordelia kenn
    Now I’ve sent it I feel even more like a nerk than when writing it. I mean, why should he care? Why should he bother? I know he knows who I am. But why should he take any notice? Am I out of my mind? Am I stupid? I look like nothing these days. No, not nothing . At least then I’d be invisible. Like – never mind! Like shit. I’m probably not his type at all . And even if he does say yes, which he won’t , just to behelpful, just to be nice – how I detest being niced to – he’ll hate me when he finds out just how bad bad BAD totally hopeless I am and just how no way can I play the fugueing Schumann. I must have been bananas to send him