This Is All (6 page)

Dead Sea Mud (Marius Limus),

Calcium Sulfate, Sodium Pyrophosphate,

C177499.

Hadn’t a clue what all that meant. But what lovely words science uses, quite musical, poems in themselves. Even the collection of numbers is like a little poem if you say it softly and quickly:

Cee-one-seven-seven-four-nine-nine.

Product not tested on animals.

I should hope not! But
someone
must have tested it, surely? Or is it permitted to slap mud from the Dead Sea, no doubt as polluted as every other sea by now, combined with various poetically named chemical substances, onto the faces of unsuspecting females without any tests being conducted for signs of danger to humans? Humans are animals too, remember.

What fools we mortals be.

The facial had to be mixed into a paste and applied with a spatula. According to Izumi, expert on these matters, the best kind of spatula for this purpose was the stick from a Magnum ice cream. There was only one left in the freezer so we shared it, while further adumbrating boys. (That should be adumberating.) We sat on my bed, wrapped in bath towels, sharing a Magnum bite for bite.

Then, as we faced each other cross-legged, hand towels wrapped round our heads like turbans to protect our hair (necessary according to the instructions – why? what would it do? make us bald? – it’s harmless but can be difficult to remove from hair), Izumi began to apply the mud, holding my head with one hand and with the other using the Magnum stick to apply the goo. She became very serious as she did this, as if painting a picture with a palette knife. It was wonderfully soothing, as I’m sure you know. Or have things changed so much by the time you read this that mud mask facials are out and some other treatment is in?

Always allow the Algimud mask to set properly, which may take anything from 10–20 minutes. It will easily peel off like a second skin.

Algimud is not water soluble, so do not try to wash it off.

‘You have lovely eyes,’ Izumi said, leaning back to survey her work. ‘Glasses hide them. Mask shows them off.’

‘Maybe I should wear a mask all the time,’ I tried to say without moving my lips so as not to crack the drying mud, which made it come out something like ‘Ay-he I hud er hu ak all hu tine,’ which gave Izumi the giggles again, almost setting me off too, so she had to rush to the bathroom to recover her composure before settling down on the bed again for me to paint her face. Applying the mud was as soothing and pleasurable as having it applied. And putting it on someone as beautiful as Izumi was, I have to admit, a turn on. Maybe, I thought, that’s one reason why people become beauticians (detestable word), and maybe physiotherapists and masseurs like body-stroking jobs also: because they’re allowed to touch beautiful bodies. No one ever says that’s a reason, but I’ll bet it is. And why not? Of course, it also means they have to handle bodies that turn them off, which means most of the time. Because, after all, the number of people who turn you on is very small, isn’t it? Otherwise, we’d be going round in a permanent state of repressed sexual dither.

When the mud-plastering was done, we gazed silently at each other for a while, waiting for the mud to dry completely, which was like having your face slowly shrink-wrapped. And because only our eyes and lips and the ends of our noses were showing, and our bodies were wrapped in similar towels and our heads in similar turbans, we looked like identical twins, mirror images of each other.

When the drying was complete Izumi took my left hand in her right and unfolded her legs and, carefully so as not to crack her mask, laid herself out full stretch on her back, her hand indicating to mine she wanted me to lie down beside her, which I did, the pair of us then like shrouded corpses.

Before we’d started applying the mud I’d put on a CD of ancient Japanese music from the time of our favourite poets, which Izumi had given me as a Christmas present. When I
first heard it, I thought it was just a boring plinky-plonky noise, a man plucking some kind of stringed instrument, one twang after another in a slow and unpredictable, not quite regular rhythm, that at first almost drove me mad. But listening to it again and again, which I did for Izumi’s sake, I discovered there was a rhythm quite unlike the rhythm of Western music. Then it began to have a strange, almost hypnotic effect, like a charm, a spell being cast, very beautiful and – not soothing exactly, but calming. And not thought-provoking, either, in the way we usually mean, but thinking that went beyond the head and beyond the body. Disembodied thought. No words could express it. I know now, though I didn’t then, that the music had lulled me into a kind of meditation.

Meditation
. This is how it felt. As I lay beside Izumi, hand in hand, my eyes closed, the Dead Sea mud shrink-wrapping my face, the music lulling me with its charm, I began to feel as if I were levitating and floating off into the air. Not
in to
, but
into
. Becoming part of the air, airy. Time vanished. I saw it like a white bird flying away. I heard the blood flowing in my ears yet my heart was stilled. Even the breath left my lungs. Thinking without thinking, feeling without feeling, a kind of absence in which at the same time, there being no time, everything was present. My body, all of me in fact, seemed like one of Izumi Shikibu’s poems: small, spare, simple, fresh, yet endless too, dense, complex, as old as the universe.

I met inside me at that moment a great deep beauty which I knew was my soul. I think this was the first time I used that lovely forgotten rejected ancient word as the name for my most essential self, my very own being.

hand in hand

into air

white bird flying

flowing in my ears

feeling

everything was present

I met

a great deep beauty

called my soul

Ding dong

The doorbell startled me out of my happy state.

‘Rats!’

Doorbells
. I don’t know what they do to you, but unexpected doorbells always make me petulant. They are to grumpy what instant is to coffee. I think it might be fear of suddenly facing an unknown attacker, which is my worst nightmare. Like waking in the night and finding a monstrous hairy man looming over me with rape on his mind. Opening a door to an unknown visitor is a bit like that in miniature. For me, anyway. I’m one of those irritating people who peek at you through a window or call out ‘Who is it?’ before opening up. And then I get even more peppery if the visitor calls out something meant to be jokey like ‘Not it but I’ or ‘The cat’s whiskers’ or worst of all ‘Guess!’ Whereas if I’m the visitor, being asked to shout out my name locks me up completely because I can’t bear the entire neighbourhood knowing it’s me standing outside waiting to be admitted. So I mutter ‘Me!’ so quietly no one can hear, not even the person inside, which, when other people do that and I’m the one inside, prickles me again because I can’t help thinking what a dunk this person is, not only to turn up without phoning first to let me know, but without the gump to say clearly who they are.

‘Don’t move,’ I said to Izumi. ‘Whoever it is will go away.’

But saying this sent a skinquake through my facial, giving it a bad case of craquelure.

The bell rang again. And again.

Then a voice called through the letterbox, ‘Cordelia? Are you there? It’s Will.’

Which sat me up with a tug.

‘It’s Will!’ I said. (Why do we repeat the obvious when in shock?)

And stood up. Instantly catching sight of myself in the mirror. A resurrected mummy or an inmate from an eighteenth-century madhouse.

‘Lordy! Can’t go like this!’

Izumi was on her feet too. Making hand gestures that meant ‘Stay here, I’ll go,’ and me waving my hand, meaning ‘No no!’ But she was gone.

I thought, I’ve got to get this mask off. I remembered the written instructions said ‘Peel off from the jaw line’, but the picture showed it being done starting from the forehead. And as I guess pictures speak louder than words in a moment of crisis, I scrabbled at it from the top. But you know how, when you’re peeling an orange, sometimes the skin comes off easily in one piece, but sometimes it tears off in little ragged bits? Well, my Dead Sea Spa Magik Algimud Seaweed Facial decided to come off in raggy little bits that looked like scabs from a mega-rash of acne.

While I was thus defacing myself with one hand and discarding my bath towel with the other in order to attire myself in something more presentable, I was listening all ears to what was going on downstairs.

What went on when Izumi opened the door was a squawk, a guffaw, a contortion of William-only laughter, followed, when he could draw breath enough to speak, by the words, ‘The grave gives up its dead!’

And, after further chortles, ‘O Death, where is thy sting?’

And then, ‘My god, Cordelia, what have you done to yourself?’

Cordelia!
…
C O R D E L I A!

Vesuvius erupted.

‘You trepanned oik!’ I howled. ‘You bombazoon! You dingbat!’

I was stumbling around as I spewed this out, struggling into jeans, a top, shoes, scrabbling with any spare fingers at the remains of my facial, all the while continuing with my larval flow.

‘You slop-bucket! You cheap jerk! You apology for … for a
man!
’

Really, I don’t know what-all I said, making it up as I went along mostly, I was so angry with him for mistaking Izumi for me, and frustrated because he
hadn’t
turned up when expected, and exasperated because he
had
turned up when
not
expected, and flustered because he’d caught me when I was togged up like a bozoette from Dumboland. Plus (detestable conjunction), I was hating myself for being so discombobulated by a
boy
and for
letting it show
.

By now I was parading down the stairs and—

‘My god, it’s you!’ Will said.

– was pronouncing much too loudly to appear in full control of myself, ‘What the hell d’you think you’re doing here?’

‘Everybody has to be somewhere,’ he said through his infuriating grin.

‘Please do
not
make old jokes. Or any jokes
at all
. Why didn’t you phone?’

I reached the bottom of the stairs. Will was standing just inside the front door. Izumi, face-mask ruinously cracked, turban coming loose, shoulders bare, but the rest of her from breasts to ankles encased in bath towel, confronting him like a puggish guard dog.

Will said, all eyes, ‘What’s happened to your face?’

‘None of your business,’ I said. But my heart sank into my stomach and my stomach churned it into sour pus, all in an instant. There was a mirror on the wall in which Doris and I always checked ourselves before going out. I forced myself not to consult it.

‘How dare you,’ I said with as much haughty calm as I could manage, ‘mistake Izumi for me?’

‘Is that who it is!’ he said, staring at her.

To her eternal credit, after a moment for reflection Izumi stamped on his foot. Unfortunately, as Will was in his Doc Martens and Izumi was bare-footed, her punishment had no effect on him but made her stumble with pain. This in turn caused her to tread on the hem of her towel, which in turn dislodged it, in turn causing her towel to collapse round her ankles, which in turn revealed her dishabille, i.e. in nothing at all. I must say, she behaved with admirable aplomb in the circumstances, muttering something in Japanese before stepping with dignity over her tumbled towel and stalking off up the stairs to my room without a hint of haste or embarrassment. I think she might even have been strutting her stuff a little.