IN 1658 THE English clergyman Edward Topsell published a handsome volume of woodcuts called A History of Four-Footed Beasts and Serpents.
Some of the creatures were familiar to townspeople and countryfolk alike – the dormouse, the cat, the beaver. Some were fantastical: the sphinx, the lamia, the winged dragon, the mantichora – a lion with a human face. And the unicorn, of course.
Other beasts illustrated by woodcut were ones that are familiar to us now – hippos, rhinos, the Egyptian crocodile, the giraffe – but in the 17th century, these creatures had been seen by few – sailors, explorers, convicts, con-men, who described them for gain and pleasure, talked them up in taverns and at fairs, whispered about them in bed late at night, by candlelight, boasted about them for wagers of money and proof of daring. And we all wanted to believe it, because the world was still new, and life was short, and a pair of dragon’s wings might come in useful.
So, out of nature and imagination combined, beasts appeared not seen before or since. But they were pictured in a book – and so they came to exist.
What I want does exist if I dare to find it.
That’s a line from Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, my first novel, published in 1985 when I was twenty-five.
Oranges is many things: a coming-of-age story, a coming-out story, a little book of fairy tales, a character called Jeanette who is not me and who is me. A story of religious excess, of working-class life in the north of England, of books and of reading.
And love.
Oranges is a quest story. It’s the start of a long search for a mythical creature called Love.
I am adopted and that fact has shaped my whole life. At six weeks old I lost the other half of my first love affair – my mother.
So life began with the disappearance of the love object.
My new parents – the Wintersons – found love difficult. They didn’t do hugs. My mother was an Old Testament type who believed in fire and brimstone. At the same time the motto of our faith and church was God is Love.
This worked for me because I already had experience of my primary love object being invisible and unreachable.
Solitary by nature and nurture – an only child – I was intense and romantic. School was useless to me, but the library contained all the classics of English literature, and I read them. My roving reading was anchored by Shakespeare at one end and stretched as far as EM Forster at the other end. A few Americans were in there – Henry James, Edith Wharton, Poe, Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Stein. I don’t think I read any Europeans back then, other than Gide and Hesse.
Essentially it was 350 years or so of the English imagination, its poetry and prose, that was crucial and formative for me.
And that includes – overshadowing it all, I guess – the King James Bible of 1611, read to me or read by me every single day of my life from babyhood to leaving home at sixteen. That’s a lot of Bible.
Literature has only lately been a secular enterprise. Most writers until the 20th century were believers of some kind, or brought up in religious households – the Brontës in their blowy parsonage, John Donne, who gave up sex and writing about it, and became Dean of St Paul’s; Laurence Sterne – the amiable author of Tristram Shandy – was a vicar. The Romantic poets returned God to Nature. William Blake, like Walt Whitman, saw God in everything.
In the 19th century in England and America, doubt was as potent a force as faith. Not to believe was defiant, and like all defiance contained explosive useful creative energy.
So I felt kinship with the underlying beliefs – or struggles with unbelief, tacit or explicit – of the writers I was reading. Growing up today would be a very different experience. Unbelief is the new normal – there’s no energy there. And, outside of secularism, the energy of belief we’re used to now manifests as fundamentalism, carrying all the hatred and violence of its competing dogmas, but none of the creative release.
The Bible begins with a grand abandonment. Exit from the Garden of Eden. Paradise lost.
Yahweh is an unstable, angry, rejecting parent with a strange idea of love. Later, in the Christian part of the Jewish story, God will allow his son Jesus to be murdered as a human sacrifice to save mankind, doomed by Yahweh in the first place. God is love? Oy veh.
Or is God so in love with his own story that he can’t rewrite it?
To me that felt like a failure of imagination. And the failure of love.
I wanted to do better.
You could call it arrogance or you could call it optimism.
So when I wrote Oranges I chaptered the sections according to the first eight books of the Bible. Not because I thought I was God, or any kind of authority – in fact, the opposite; the thing didn’t have to be written on tablets of stone. There was no rigid rulebook. No last word.
I had understood something – I could change the story.
Could I?
Writing is an attempt to make a world. I was telling myself the story of myself. In Oranges I became a fictional character trying to understand love – and coming to understand that, without love, nothing can be understood.
It was first love, awakening love, love as separation, love as sleepless nights and broken hearts. Love as trial by fire. The fearfulness of love. And it was love between women. There wasn’t much written about that back then.
Love between women became, for some readers, a way of trying to categorise the book – to lock it into a smaller space than it occupied. I have always been clear – I am a writer whose emotional interest is forwarded towards women, and whose sexual interest usually is. That is important, but it isn’t the reason I write, nor does it preoccupy me.
Heterosexual choice is allowed to be the background of a writer’s life; its wallpaper. So is maleness. And whiteness. Step out of that and you will be called a feminist writer, a lesbian writer, a gay writer, a woman writer. A black writer. You will never be called a heterosexual writer or a male writer or a white writer. Those signifiers are absorbed into the single word ‘writer’.
It is changing. I have been part of the change. And glad to be. It matters to stand up politically for what you believe in. It matters to carry into the mainstream what the mainstream has tried to marginalise.
But writing is more than content. More than the stories we tell. Literature is an engagement with our deepest selves, a shaping of a language to talk about who we are – away from clichés and approximations, away from generalisations and half-truths. And oddly, literature is a way, at last, of not having to talk about anything. The moment that you put the book down. The moment you stare into space. A knowing that is beyond ordinary knowing. Resolution? Or peace? Or illumination? To pass through language back into silence. We start with silence, and we return to silence, but without language to guide us we cannot return there because
Words are the part of silence that can be spoken.
Oranges is about transgressive love – love between young women – and young women who wanted their love to include sex. Why would you not want love to include sex?
Oranges is about absences as well as inclusions; the absence of family love. What do you do if your parents don’t know how to love you, and if you don’t know how to love your parents?
And overarching the story is God’s love – whatever that is. Invisible love – problematic and potent.
And I suppose those demonstrations of love were what I was trying to follow.
Love. Loss. Struggle. Loneliness. Abandonment. Separation. Faithfulness. Rejection. The natural world as an ally. Home as a place to leave behind. The search for meaning.
And could meaning be found through love?
Meaning.
Love.
What do those words mean, comets that they are, their tails stretched with stars? Their tales stretched with stars?
I was trying to trace light that had long left its source.
The story of my life starts there. Or is it here?
LIKE MOST PEOPLE I lived for a long time with my mother and father. My father liked to watch the wrestling. My mother liked to wrestle; it didn’t matter what. She was in the white corner and that was that.
She hung out the largest sheets on the windiest days. She wanted the Mormons to knock on the door. At election time in a Labour mill town, my mother put a picture of the Conservative candidate in the window.
My mother had never heard of mixed feelings. There were friends and there were enemies.
| Enemies were: | The Devil (in his many forms) Next Door Sex (in its many forms) Slugs |
| Friends were: | God Our dog Auntie Madge The Novels of Charlotte Brontë Slug pellets |
And me, at first. I had been brought in to join her in a tag match against the Rest of the World. She had a mysterious attitude towards the begetting of children; it wasn’t that she couldn’t do it, more that she didn’t want to do it. She was very bitter about the Virgin Mary getting there first. So she did the next best thing and arranged for a foundling. That was me.
This is both me and not me. Oranges isn’t autobiography or confessional. Part fiction, part fact is what life is. The stories we tell are all cover versions.
MY MOTHER AND I walked on towards the hill that stood at the top of our street. We lived in a town stolen from the valleys, a huddled place full of chimneys and little shops and back-to-back houses with no gardens. The hills surrounded us, and our own pushed out into the Pennines, broken here and there with a farm or a relic from the war. There used to be a lot of old tanks but the council took them away. The town was a fat blot, and the streets spread back from it into the green, steadily upwards. Our house was almost at the top of a long stretchy street. A flag-stone street with a cobbled road. Climb to the top of the hill and look down and you can see everything, just like Jesus on the pinnacle, except it’s not very tempting. Over to the right, there’s the viaduct, and behind the viaduct, Ellison’s Tenement, where we have the fair once a year. I was allowed to go there on condition that I brought back a tub of black peas for my mother. Black peas look like rabbit droppings and they come in a thin gravy made of stock and gypsy mush … Once when I was collecting the black peas, about to go home, the old woman took hold of my hand. I thought she was going to bite me. She looked at my palm and laughed a bit. ‘You’ll never marry,’ she said, ‘not you, and you’ll never be still.’
She didn’t take any money for the peas, and she told me to run home fast. I ran and ran, trying to understand what she meant. I hadn’t thought about getting married anyway. There were two women I knew who didn’t have husbands at all; they were old though, as old as my mother. They ran a newspaper shop, and sometimes, on a Wednesday, they gave me a banana bar with my comic. I liked them a lot and I talked about them a lot to my mother. One day, they asked me if I’d like to go to the seaside with them. I ran home, gabbled it out, and was busy emptying my money box to buy a new bucket and spade, when my mother said firmly, and forever, no. I couldn’t understand why not, and she wouldn’t explain. She didn’t even let me go back to say I couldn’t go. Then she cancelled my comic and told me to collect it from another shop, further away. I was sorry about that. I never got a banana bar from Grimsby’s.
A couple of weeks later I heard her telling Mrs White about it. She said they dealt in unnatural passions. I thought she meant they put chemicals in their sweets.
Does sex begin with a sense of transgression?
As long as I have known them my mother has gone to bed at four and my father has got up at five
Does love survive the loss of physical intimacy?
IT WAS SPRING, the ground still had traces of snow, and I was about to be married. My dress was pure white and I had a golden crown. As I walked up the aisle the crown got heavier and heavier and the dress more and more difficult to walk in. I thought everyone would point at me, but no one noticed.
Somehow I made it to the altar. The priest was very fat and kept getting fatter, like bubblegum you blow. Finally we came to the moment, ‘You may kiss the bride.’ My new husband turned to me, and here were a number of possibilities. Sometimes he was blind, sometimes a pig, sometimes my mother, sometimes the man from the post office, and once, just a suit of clothes with nothing inside. I told my mother about it, and she said it was because I ate sardines for supper. The next night I ate sausages, but I still had the dream.
There was a woman in our street who told us all she had married a pig. I asked her why she did it, and she said, ‘You never know until it’s too late.’
Exactly.
No doubt that woman had discovered in life what I had discovered in my dreams. She had unwittingly married a pig.
I kept watch on him after that. It was hard to tell he was a pig. He was clever, but his eyes were close together, and his skin bright pink. I tried to imagine him without his clothes on. Horrid.
Other men I knew weren’t much better.
The man who ran the post office was bald and shiny with hands too fat for the sweet jars. He called me poppet, which my mother said was nice. He gave me sweets too, which was an improvement.
One day he had a new sort.
‘Sweet hearts for a sweet heart,’ he said and laughed. That day I had almost strangled my dog with rage, and been dragged from the house by a desperate mother. Sweet I was not. But I was a little girl, ergo, I was sweet, and here were sweets to prove it. I looked in the bag. Yellow and pink and sky-blue and orange, and all of them heart-shaped and all of them said things like,
Maureen 4 Ken,
Jack ’n’ Jill, True.
On the way home I crunched at the Maureen 4 Kens. I was confused. Everyone always said you found the right man.
My mother said it, which was confusing.
My auntie said it, which was even more confusing.
The man in the post office sold it on sweets.
But there was the problem of the woman married to the pig, and the spotty boy who took girls down backs, and my dream.
That afternoon I went to the library. I went the long way, so as to miss the couples. They made funny noises that sounded painful, and the girls were always squashed against the wall. In the library I felt better; words you could trust and look at till you understood them, they couldn’t change half way through a sentence like people, so it was easier to spot a lie. I found a book of fairy tales, and read one called ‘Beauty and the Beast’.
In this story, a beautiful young woman finds herself the forfeit of a bad bargain made by her father. As a result, she has to marry an ugly beast, or dishonour her family forever. Because she is good, she obeys. On her wedding night she gets into bed with the beast, and feeling pity that everything should be so ugly, gives it a little kiss. Immediately, the beast is transformed into a handsome young prince, and they both live happily ever after.
I wondered if the woman married to a pig had read this story. She must have been awfully disappointed if she had. And what about my Uncle Bill? He was horrible, and hairy, and looking at the picture, transformed princes aren’t meant to be hairy at all.
Slowly I closed the book. It was clear that I had stumbled on a terrible conspiracy.
There are women in the world.
There are men in the world.
And there are beasts.
What do you do if you marry a beast?
Kissing them didn’t always help. And beasts are crafty. They disguise themselves like you and I.
Like the wolf in ‘Little Red Riding Hood’.
Why had no one told me? Did that mean no one else knew?
Did that mean that all over the globe, in all innocence, women were marrying beasts?
I reassured myself as best I could. The minister was a man, but he wore a skirt, so that made him special. There must be others, but were there enough? That was the worry. There were a lot of women, and most of them got married. If they couldn’t marry each other, and I didn’t think they could, because of having babies, some of them would inevitably have to marry beasts.
My own family had done quite badly, I thought.
If only there was some way of telling, then we could operate a ration system. It wasn’t fair that a whole street should be full of beasts.
That night, we had to go to my auntie’s to play Beetle. She was in the team at church, and needed to practise. As she dealt the cards, I asked her, ‘Why are so many men really beasts?’
She laughed. ‘You’re too young for that.’
My uncle had overheard. He came over to me, and put his face close.
‘You wouldn’t love us any other way,’ he said, and rubbed his spiky chin against my face. I hated him.
‘Leave off, Bill,’ my auntie pushed him away. ‘Don’t worry, love,’ she soothed, ‘you’ll get used to it. When I married, I laughed for a week, cried for a month, and settled down for life. It’s different, that’s all, they have their little ways.’ I looked at my uncle, who was now sunk in the pools coupon.
‘You hurt me,’ I accused.
‘No I didn’t,’ he grinned. ‘It was just a bit of love.’
‘That’s what you always say,’ my auntie retorted, ‘now shut up or go out.’
He slunk off. I half expected him to have a tail.
She spread the cards. ‘There’s time enough for you to get a boy.’
‘I don’t think I want one.’
‘There’s what we want,’ she said, putting down a jack, ‘and there’s what we get, remember that.’
Was she trying to tell me she knew about the beasts? I got very depressed and started putting the Beetle legs on the wrong way round, and generally making a mess. Eventually my auntie stood up and sighed. ‘You might as well go home,’ she said.
I went to fetch my mother, who was in the parlour listening to Johnny Cash.
‘Come on, we’re finished.’
Slowly she put on her coat, and picked up her little Bible, the travel-size one. We set off together down the street.
‘I’ve got to talk to you, have you got time?’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘let’s have an orange.’
I tried to explain my dream, and the beast theory, and how much I hated Uncle Bill. All the time my mother walked along humming ‘What a Friend We Have in Jesus’, and peeling me an orange. She stopped peeling and I stopped talking about the same time. I had one last question.
‘Why did you marry my dad?’
She looked at me closely.
‘Don’t be silly.’
‘I’m not being silly.’
‘We had to have something for you, and besides, he’s a good man, though I know he’s not one to push himself. But don’t you worry, you’re dedicated to the Lord, I put you down for missionary school as soon as we got you. Remember Jane Eyre and St John Rivers.’ A faraway look came into her eye.
I did remember, but what my mother didn’t know was that I now knew she had rewritten the ending. Jane Eyre was her favourite non-Bible book, and she read it to me over and over again, when I was very small. I couldn’t read it, but I knew where the pages turned. Later, literate and curious, I had decided to read it for myself. A sort of nostalgic pilgrimage. I found out, that dreadful day in a back corner of the library, that Jane doesn’t marry St John at all, that she goes back to Mr Rochester. It was like the day I discovered my adoption papers while searching for a pack of playing cards. I have never since played cards, and I have never since read Jane Eyre.
We continued our walk in silence. She thought I was satisfied, but I was wondering about her, and wondering where I would go to find out what I wanted to know.
When it was washday I hid in the dustbin to hear what the women said. Nellie came out with her bit of rope and strung it up nail to nail across the back alley. She waved to Doreen who was struggling up the hill with her shopping, offering her a cup of tea and a talk. Each Wednesday Doreen queued up at the butcher’s for the special offer mince. It always put her in a bad mood because she was a member of the Labour party and believed in equal shares and equal rights. She started to tell Nellie about the woman in front buying steak. Nellie shook her head which was small and tufted, and said it had been hard for her too since Bert died.
‘Bert,’ spat Doreen, ‘he were dead ten years before they laid him out.’ Then she offered Nellie a wine gum.
‘Well I don’t like to speak ill of the dead,’ said Nellie uneasily, ‘you never know.’
Doreen snorted and squatted painfully on the back step. Her skirt was too tight, but she always pretended it had shrunk.
‘What about speaking ill of the living? My Frank’s up to no good.’
Nellie took a deep breath and another wine gum. She asked if it was the woman who served pie and peas in the pub; Doreen didn’t know, but now that she thought of it that would explain why he always smelled of gravy when he came home late.
‘You should never have married him,’ scolded Nellie.
‘I didn’t know what he was when I married him, did I?’ And she told Nellie about the war and how her dad had liked him, and how it seemed sensible. ‘I should have guessed though, what kind of a man comes round to court you and ends up drinking with your dad instead? I used to sit all done up playing whist with his mother and one of her friends.’
‘Did he not take you anywhere then?’
‘Oh yes,’ said Doreen, ‘we used to go down the dog track every Saturday afternoon.’
The two of them sat in silence for a while then Doreen went on, ‘Course the children helped. I ignored him for fifteen years.’
‘Still,’ Nellie reassured her, ‘you’re not as bad as Hilda across the road, her one drinks every penny, and she daren’t go to the police.’
‘If mine touched me I’d have him put away,’ said Doreen grimly.
‘Would you?’
Doreen paused and scratched in the dirt with her shoe.
‘Let’s have a smoke,’ offered Nellie, ‘and you tell me about Jane.’
Jane was Doreen’s daughter, just turned seventeen and very studious.
‘If she don’t get a boyfriend folks will talk. She spends all her time at that Susan’s doing her homework, or so she tells me.’
Nellie thought that Jane might be seeing a boy on the quiet, pretending to be at Susan’s. Doreen shook her head. ‘She’s there all right, I check with Susan’s mother. If they’re not careful folk will think they’re like them two at the paper shop.’
‘I like them two,’ said Nellie firmly, ‘and who’s to say they do anything?’
‘Mrs Fergeson across saw them getting a new bed, a double bed.’
‘Well what does that prove? Me and Bert had one bed but we did nothing in it.’
Doreen said that was all very well, but two women were different.
Different from what? I wondered from inside the dustbin.
‘Well your Jane can go to university and move away, she’s clever.’
‘Frank won’t put up with that, he wants grandchildren, and if I don’t get a move on there’ll be no dinner for him and he’ll be back with pie and peas in the pub. I don’t want to give him an excuse.’
She struggled to her feet as Nellie started to peg out the washing. When it was safe, I crept out of the dustbin, as confused as ever and covered in soot.
It was a good thing I was destined to become a missionary. For some time after this I put aside the problem of men and concentrated on reading the Bible. Eventually, I thought, I’ll fall in love like everybody else. Then some years later, quite by mistake, I did.
‘By mistake …’ Does love always happen by chance? That’s one of the questions of this first book of mine and many that followed. I still haven’t found the answer but the question has become more problematic to me. I like the idea of free will but the ancients knew a thing or two about Fate.
I WOULDN’T HAVE noticed Melanie if I hadn’t gone round the other side of the stall to look at the aquarium.
She was boning kippers on a big marble slab. She used a thin stained knife, throwing the gut into a tin bucket. The clean fish she laid on greaseproof paper. Every fourth fish had a sprig of parsley.
‘I’d like to do that,’ I said.
She smiled and carried on.
‘Do you like doing it?’
Still she said nothing, so I slid, as discreetly as a person in a pink plastic mac can, to the other side of the tank. I couldn’t see very well because of the hood over my eyes.
‘Can I have some fish-bait?’ I said.
She looked up, and I noticed that her eyes were a lovely grey, like the cat Next Door.
‘I’m not supposed to have friends at work.’
‘But I’m not your friend.’
‘No, but they’ll think you are.’
‘Well … I might as well be then …’
What follows in Oranges is the unfolding of this relationship – how it moves from an unexpected friendship to an unexpected love affair. The girls I am writing about are not savvy, not sophisticated. There was no internet back then. They don’t know anyone like themselves. They are both going to church and reading the Bible and they feel happy there, and happy together. And then the thing deepens, because the body can’t lie.
WHEN I REACHED Melanie’s it was getting dark. I had to cut through the churchyard to get to her. Sometimes I’d steal her a bunch of flowers from the new graves. She was always pleased but I never told her where they came from. She asked me if I wanted to stay overnight because her mum was away and she didn’t like being in the house on her own. I said I’d ring a neighbour, and after a lot of trouble finally got an agreement from my mother, who had to be fetched from her lettuces. We read the Bible as usual, and we told each other how glad we were that the Lord had brought us together. She stroked my head for a long time, and then we hugged, and it felt like drowning. Then I was frightened but couldn’t stop. There was something crawling in my belly. I had an octopus inside me …
‘Do you think this is Unnatural Passions?’
HERE IS A table set at feast and the guests are arguing about the best recipe for goose. A tremor shakes the chandelier, dropping tiny flakes of plaster into the sherbet. The guests look up, more in interest than alarm. It’s cold in here. So cold. The women suffer most. Their shoulders bared and white like hard-boiled eggs. Outside, under the snow, the river sleeps embalmed. These are the elect, and in the hall, an army sleeps on straw.
Outside, a rush of torches.
Laughter drifts through the hall. The elect have always been this way.
Getting old. Dying. Starting again. Not noticing.
Father and Son. Father and Son.
It has always been this way. Nothing can intrude.
Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.
Outside, the rebels storm the Winter Palace.
Love, the naturaliser of everything artificial, and at the same time the ultimate artifice, the elaborate construct, the mind’s narrative of the body’s desire. Love, the destroyer.
The change in Jeanette (me and not me) is noticed by her mother, who at first concludes that her daughter has fallen for a good-looking lad at church. As the Chief of the Sex Police, Mother feels the time is right for the story of Pierre …
‘THERE’S A BOY at church I think you’re keen on.’
‘What?’ I said, completely mystified.
She meant Graham, a newish convert, who’d moved over to our town from Stockport. I was teaching him to play the guitar, and trying to make him understand the importance of regular Bible study.
‘It’s time,’ she went on, very solemn, ‘that I told you about Pierre and how I nearly came to a bad end.’ Then she poured us both a cup of tea and opened a packet of Royal Scot. I was enthralled.
‘It’s not something I’m proud of, and I’ll only say it once.’
My mother had been headstrong, and had got a job teaching in Paris, which was a very daring thing to do at the time. She had lived off the Rue St Germain, eaten croissants and lived a clean life. She wasn’t with the Lord then, but she had high standards. Then, one sunny day, without warning, she had been walking towards the river when she met Pierre, or rather Pierre had jumped from his bicycle, offered her his onions, and named her the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.
‘Naturally, I was flattered.’
They exchanged addresses, and began to court one another. It was then that my mother experienced a feeling she had never known before: a fizzing and a buzzing and a certain giddiness. Not only with Pierre, but anywhere, at any time.
‘Well, I thought it must be love.’
But this puzzled her because Pierre wasn’t very clever, and didn’t have much to say, except to exclaim how beautiful she was. Perhaps he was handsome? But no, looking in the magazines, she realised he wasn’t that either. But the feeling wouldn’t go away. Then, on a quiet night, after a quiet supper, Pierre had seized her and begged her to stay with him that night. The fizzing began, and as he clutched her to him, she felt sure she would never love another, and yes she would stay and after that, they would marry.
‘Lord forgive me, but I did it.’
My mother stopped, overcome with emotion. I begged her to finish the story, proffering the Royal Scots.
‘The worst is still to come.’
I speculated on the worst, while she chewed her biscuit. Perhaps I wasn’t a child of God at all, but the daughter of a Frenchman.
A couple of days afterward, my mother had gone to see the doctor in a fit of guilty anxiety. She lay on the couch while the doctor prodded her stomach and chest, asking if she ever felt giddy, or fizzy in the belly. My mother coyly explained that she was in love, and that she often felt strange, but that wasn’t the reason for her visit.
‘You may well be in love,’ said the doctor, ‘but you also have a stomach ulcer.’
Imagine my mother’s horror. She had given away her all for an ailment. She took the tablets, followed the diet, and refused Pierre’s entreaties to visit her. Needless to say, the next time they met, and again by chance, she felt nothing, nothing at all, and shortly fled the country to avoid him.
‘Then am I …?’ I began.
‘There was no issue,’ she said quickly.
For a few moments we sat silent, then:
‘So just you take care, what you think is the heart might well be another organ.’ It might, Mother, it might, I thought. She got up and told me to go and find something to do. I decided to go and see Melanie, but just as I reached the door she called me back with a word of warning.
‘Don’t let anyone touch you Down There,’ and she pointed to somewhere at the level of her apron pocket.
‘No Mother,’ I said meekly, and fled.
I TRACED THE outline of her marvellous bones and the triangle of muscle in her stomach. What is it about intimacy that makes it so disturbing?
Love ends, of course. I mean, the love affair ends badly, because the church calls it a sin and the girls are separated. Melanie believes her love for Jeanette was a perversion, and she’s glad to start dating boys, and eventually to marry. For Jeanette, things are more complicated. She can’t lie about her feelings.
There’s a further relationship with another girl – eventually discovered, and that’s it – she’s out of house and home, living what kind of a patched-together life she can until she leaves for university.
During her first Christmas holiday she returns to find her mother has bought an electronic organ and built a CB radio to broadcast the gospel to the Heathen – mainly the Heathen living in Manchester.
I MISS GOD. I miss the company of someone loyal. I don’t think of God as my betrayer. I miss God who was my friend. I don’t know if God exists but I know that if God is your emotional role model, few human relationships will match up. I have an idea that it might be possible. I thought once it had become possible, and that glimpse of something has sent me wandering, trying to find the balance between earth and sky.
I can’t settle. I want someone who is fierce and who will love me unto death and know that love is as strong as death and be on my side for ever and ever. I want someone who will destroy and be destroyed by me. There are many forms of love and affection; some people can spend their whole lives together without knowing each other’s names. Naming is difficult and time-consuming; it concerns essences and it means power.
On the wild nights, who can call you home? Only the one who knows your name.
Romantic love has been diluted into paperback form and has sold thousands and millions of copies. Somewhere it is still in the original, written on tablets of stone …
The unknownness of my needs frightens me. I do not know how huge they are or how high they are. I only know that they are not being met …
One thing I am certain of – I do not want to be betrayed, but that’s quite hard to say, casually, at the beginning of a relationship. There are different kinds of infidelity but betrayal is betrayal wherever you find it. By betrayal I mean promising to be on your side, then being on someone else’s.
STANDING ON THE side of the hill where it slopes into the quarry, it’s possible to see where Melanie used to live. I met her by accident during the second year I didn’t live at home. She was pushing a pram. She had been serene to the point of bovine before; now she was nearly vegetable. I kept looking at her wondering how we had ever had a relationship, yet when she first left me I thought I had blood poisoning. I couldn’t forget her. Now she seemed to have forgotten everything. I wanted to shake her. Pull off all my clothes in the middle of the street and yell REMEMBER THIS BODY?
Time is a great deadener. People forget, get bored, grow old, go away.
She said that not much had happened between us anyway, historically speaking. But history is a string full of knots, the best you can do is admire it and maybe knot it up some more. History is a hammock for swinging and a game for playing. A cat’s cradle.
She said those sorts of feelings were dead – the feelings she once had for me. There is a seductiveness about dead things. You can ill treat, alter, and recolour what’s dead – it won’t complain. Then she laughed and said we probably saw what had happened very differently anyway. She laughed again – she said that the way I saw it would make a good story, her version was just the history, the nothing-at-all facts. She said she hoped I hadn’t kept any letters, silly to hang onto old things that had no meaning. As though letters and photos made it more real, more dangerous.
I told her I didn’t need letters and photos to remember what had happened. Then she looked vague and started to discuss the weather and the roadworks and the soaring price of baby food.
SHE ASKED ME what I was doing and I longed to say I was sacrificing infants on top of Pendle Hill. Anything to make her angry. But she was happy. They had stopped eating meat and she was pregnant again. She had even started writing to my mother.
It was getting dark as I came down the hill, swirls of snow sticking to my face. I thought about the dog and was sad for her death, for my death, for all the inevitable dying that comes with change. There’s no choice that doesn’t mean a loss. But the dog was buried in the clean earth and the things I had buried were exhuming themselves; clammy fears and dangerous thoughts and the shadows I had put away for a more convenient time. I could not put them away for ever; there is always a day of reckoning. But not all dark places need light. I have to remember that.
I DO HAVE to remember that – all these years later. Not all dark places need light.