The World and Other Places: Stories

by Jeanette Winterson

  She does perform miracles but they are of the physical kind and ordered by her Rule of Thumb to the lower regions. She goes among the poor with every kind of salve unmindful of reward. She dresses in blue she tells me so that they will know she is a saint and it is saintly to taste the waters of so many untried wells.

  I have been jealous of course. I have punished her good deeds with some alms-giving of my own. It’s not the answer, I can’t catch her by copying her, I can’t draw her with a borrowed stencil. She is all the things a lover should be and quite a few a lover should not. Pin her down? She’s not a butterfly. I’m not a wrestler. She’s not a target. I’m not a gun. Tell you what she is? She’s not Lot no. 27 and I’m not one to brag.

  We were by the sea yesterday and the sea was heavy with salt so that our hair was braided with it. There was salt on our hands and in our wounds where we’d been fighting. ‘Don’t hurt me,’ I said and I unbuttoned my shirt so that she could look at my breasts if she wanted to. ‘I’m no saint,’ she said and that was true, true too that our feet are the same size. The rocks were reptile blue and the sky that balanced on the top of the cliffs was sheer blue. Picasso made me put on her jersey and drink dark tea from a fifties flask.

  ‘It’s winter,’ she said. ‘Let’s go.’

  We did go, leaving the summer behind, leaving a trail of footprints two by two in identical four. I don’t know that anyone behind could have told you which was which and if they had there would have been no trace by morning.

  What Do Lesbians Do in Bed?

  Under cover of the sheets the tabloid world of lust and vice is useful only in so much as Picasso can wipe her brushes on it. Beneath the sheets we practise Montparnasse, that is Picasso offers to paint me but we have sex instead.

  We met at Art School on a shiny corridor. She came towards me so swiftly that the linoleum dissolved under her feet. I thought, ‘A woman who can do that to an oil cloth can certainly do something for me.’ I made the first move. I took her by her pony tail the way a hero grabs a runaway horse. She was taken aback. When she turned round I kissed her ruby mouth and took a sample of her sea blue eyes. She was salty, well preserved, well made and curved like a wave. I thought, ‘This is the place to go surfing.’

  We went back to her studio, where naturally enough, there was a small easel and a big bed. ‘My work comes first,’ she said. ‘Would you mind?’ and not waiting for an answer she mixed an ochre wash before taking me like a dog my breasts hanging over the pillow.

  Not so fast Picasso, I too can rumple you like a farm hand, roll you like good tobacco leaf against my thighs. I can take that arrogant throat and cut it with desire. I can make you dumb with longing, tease you like a doxy on a date.

  Slowly now Picasso, where the falling light hits the floor. Lie with me in the bruised light that leaves dark patches on your chest. You look tubercular, so thin and mottled, quiescent now. I picked you up and carried you to the bed dusty with ill-use. I found a newspaper under the sheets advertising rationing.

  The girl on the canvas was sulky. She hadn’t come to be painted. I’d heard all about you my tear-away tiger, so fierce, so unruly. But the truth is other as truth always is. What holds the small space between my legs is not your artistic tongue nor any of the other parts you play at will but the universe beneath the sheets that we make together.

  We are in our igloo and it couldn’t be snugger. White on white on white on white. Sheet Picasso me sheet. Who’s on top depends on where you’re standing but as we’re lying down it doesn’t matter. What an Eskimo I am, breaking her seductive ice and putting in my hand for fish. How she wriggles, slithers, twists to resist me but I can bait her and I do. A fine catch, one in each hand and one in my mouth. Impressive for a winter afternoon and the stove gone out and the rent to pay. We are warm and rich and white. I have so much enjoyed my visit.

  ‘Come again?’ she asked. Yes tomorrow, under the sodium street lights, under the tick of the clock. Under my obligations, my history, my fears, this now. This fizzy, giddy all consuming now. I will not let time lie to me. I will not listen to dead voices or unborn pain. ‘What if?’ has no power against ‘What if not?’ The not of you is unbearable. I must have you. Let them prate, those scorn-eyed anti-romantics. Love is not the oil and I am not the machine. Love is you and here I am. Now.

  Were You Born a Lesbian?

  Picasso is an unlikely mother but I owe myself to her. We are honour-bound, love-bound, bound by cords too robust for those healthy hospital scissors. She baptised me from her own font and said, ‘I name thee Sappho.’ People often ask if we are mother and child.

  I could say yes, I could say no, both statements would be true, the way that lesbians are true, at least to one another if not to the world. I am no stranger to the truth but very uncomfortable about the lies that have dogged me since my birth. It is no surprise that we do not always remember our name.

  I am proud to be Picasso’s lover in spite of the queer looks we get when holding hands on busy streets. ‘Mummy, why is that man staring at us?’ I said when only one month old. ‘Don’t worry dear, he can’t help it, he’s got something wrong with his eyes.’

  We need more Labradors. The world is full of blind people. They don’t see Picasso and me dignified in our love. They see perverts, inverts, tribades, homosexuals. They see circus freaks and Satan worshippers, girl-catchers and porno turn-ons. Picasso says they don’t know how to look at pictures either.

  Were You Born a Lesbian?

  A fairy in a pink tutu came to Picasso and said, ‘I bring you tidings of great joy. All by yourself with no one to help you you will give birth to a sex toy who has a way with words. You will call her Sappho and she will be a pain in the ass to all men.’

  ‘Can’t you see I’ve got a picture to finish?’ said Picasso.

  ‘Take a break,’ said the fairy. ‘There’s more to life than Art.’

  ‘Where?’ said Picasso, whose first name wasn’t Mary.

  ‘Between your legs,’ said Gabriel.

  ‘Forget it. Don’t you know I paint with my clit?’

  ‘Here, try a brush,’ said the fairy offering her a fat one.

  ‘I’ve had all the brushes I need,’ said Picasso.

  ‘Too Late,’ said the fairy. ‘Here she comes.’

  Picasso slammed the door on her studio and ran across to the Art College where she had to give a class. She was angry so that her breath burnt the air. She was angry so that her feet dissolved the thin lino tiles already scuffed to ruin by generations of brogues. There was no one in the corridor or if there was she was no one. Picasso didn’t recognise her, she had her eyes on the door and the door looked away. Picasso, running down the clean corridor, was suddenly trip-wired, badly thrown, her hair came away from her glorious head. She was being scalped. She was being mugged. She was detonated on a long fuse of sex. Her body was half way out of the third floor window and there was a demon against her mouth. A poker-red pushing babe crying, ‘Feed me, Feed me now.’

  Picasso took her home, what else could she do? She took her home to straighten her out and had her kinky side up. She mated with this creature she had borne and began to feel that maybe the Greek gods knew a thing or two. Flesh of her flesh she fucked her.

  They were quiet then because Sappho hadn’t learned a language. She was still two greedy hands and an open mouth. She throbbed like an outboard motor, she was as sophisticated as a ham sandwich. She had nothing to offer but herself, and Picasso, who thought she had seen it all before, smiled like a child and fell in love.

  Why Do You Hate Men?

  Here comes Sappho, scorching the history books with tongues of flame. Never mind the poetry feel the erection. Oh yes, women get erect, today my body is stiff with sex. When I see a word held hostage to manhood I have to rescue it. Sweet trembling word, locked in a tower, tired of your Prince coming and coming. I will scale you and discover that size is no object especially when we’re talking inches.

  I like to be a hero, l
ike to come back to my island full of girls carrying a net of words forbidden them. Poor girls, they are locked outside their words just as the words are locked into meaning. Such a lot of locking up goes on on the Mainland but here the doors are always open.

  Stay inside, don’t walk the streets, bar the windows, keep your mouth shut, keep your legs together, strap your purse around your neck, don’t wear valuables, don’t look up, don’t talk to strangers, don’t risk it, don’t try it. He means she except when it means Men. This is a Private Club.

  That’s all right boys, so is this. This delicious unacknowledged island where we are naked with each other. The boat that brings us here will crack beneath your weight. This is territory you cannot invade. We lay on the bed, Picasso and I, listening to the terrible bawling of Salami. Salami is a male artist who wants to be a Lesbian.

  ‘I’ll pay you twice the rent,’ he cries, fingering his greasy wallet.

  ‘I’ll paint you for posterity. I love women, don’t you know? Oh God I wish I was a woman, wafer-thin like you, I could circle you with one hand.’ He belches.

  Picasso is unimpressed. She says, ‘The world is full of heterosexuals, go and find one, half a dozen, swallow them like oysters, but get out.’

  ‘Oh whip me,’ says Salami getting moist.

  We know the pattern. In half an hour he’ll be violent and when he’s threatened us enough, he’ll go to the sleaze pit and watch two girls for the price of a steak.

  As soon as he left we forgot about him. Making love we made a dictionary of forbidden words. We are words, sentences, stories, books. You are my New Testament. We are a gospel to each other, I am your annunciation, revelation. You are my St Mark, winged lion at your feet. I’ll have you, and the lion too, buck under you till you learn how to saddle me. Don’t dig those spurs too deep. It’s not so simple this lexographic love. When you have sunk me to the pit I’ll mine you in return and we shall be husbands to each other as well as wives.

  I’ll tell you something Salami, a woman can get hard and keep it there all night and when she’s not required to stand she knows how to roll. She can do it any way up and her lover always comes. There are no frigid lesbians, think of that.

  On this island where we live, keeping what we do not tell, we have found the infinite variety of Woman. On the Mainland, Woman is largely extinct in all but a couple of obvious forms. She is still cultivated as a cash crop but is nowhere to be found growing wild.

  Salami hates to hear us fuck. He bangs on the wall like a zealot at an orgy. ‘Go home,’ we say, but he doesn’t. He’d rather lie against the skirting board complaining that we stop him painting. The real trouble is that we have rescued a word not allowed to our kind.

  He hears it pounding through the wall day and night. He smells it on our clothes and sees it smeared on our faces. We are happy Picasso and I. Happy.

  Don’t You Find There’s Something Missing?

  I thought I had lost Picasso. I thought the bright form that shapes my days had left me. I was loose at the edges, liquid with uncertainty. The taut lines of love slackened. I felt myself unravelling backwards, away from her. Would the thinning thread snap?

  For seven years she and I had been in love. Love between lovers, love between mother and child. Love between man and wife. Love between friends. I had been all of those things to her and she had been all of those things to me. What we were we were in equal parts, and twin souls to one another. We like to play roles but we know who we are. You are beauty to me Picasso. Not only sensuous beauty that pleases the eye but artistic beauty that challenges it. Sometimes you are ugly in your beauty, magnificently ugly and you frighten me for all the right reasons.

  I did not tell you this yesterday or the day before. Habit had silenced me the way habit does. So used to a thing no need to speak it, so well known the action no need to describe it. But I know that speech is freedom which is not the same as freedom of speech. I have no right to say what I please when I please but I have the gift of words with which to bless you. Bless you Picasso. Bless you for your straight body like a spire. You are the landmark that leads me through the streets of the everyday. You take me past the little houses towards the church where we worship. I do worship you because you are worthy of praise. Bless you Picasso for your able hands that carry the paint to the unbirthed canvas. Your fingers were red when you fucked me and my body striped with joy. I miss the weals of our passion just as I miss the daily tenderness of choosing you. Choosing you above all others, my pearl of great price.

  My feelings for you are biblical; that is they are intense, reckless, arrogant, risky and unconcerned with the way of the world. I flaunt my bleeding wounds, madden with my certainty. The Kingdom of Heaven is within you Picasso. Bless you.

  There is something missing and that is you. Your clothes were gone yesterday, your easel was packed flat and silent against the wall. When I got up and left our unmade bed there was the smell of coffee in the house but not the smell of you. I looked in the mirror and I knew who was to blame. Why take the perfect thing and smash it? Some goods are smashed that cannot be replaced.

  It has been difficult this last year. Love is difficult. Love gets harder which is not the same as to say that it gets harder to love. You are not hard to love. You are hard to love well. Your standards are high, you won’t settle for the quick way out which is why you made for the door. If I am honest I will admit that I have always wanted to avoid love. Yes give me romance, give me sex, give me fights, give me all the parts of love but not the simple single word which is so complex and demands the best of me this hour this minute this forever.

  Picasso won’t paint the same picture twice. She says develop or die. She won’t let yesterday’s love suffice for today. She makes it new, she remixes her colours and stretches her canvas until it sighs. My mother was glad when she heard we’d split up. She said, ‘Now you can come back to the Mainland. I’ll send Phaeon to pick you up.’ Phaeon runs a little business called LESBIAN TOURS. He drives his motor-boat round and round the island, just outside the one mile exclusion zone. He points out famous lesbians to sight-seers who always say, ‘But she’s so attractive!’ or ‘She’s so ugly!’

  ‘Yeah,’ says Phaeon, ‘and you know what? They’re all in love with me.’ One sight-seer shakes his head like a collecting box for a good cause. ‘Can’t you just ask one of ’em?’ he says. ‘I can ask them anything,’ says Phaeon who never waits to hear the answer.

  Why Do You Sleep with Girls?

  Picasso has loved me for fifty years and she loves me still. We got through the charcoal tunnel where the sun stopped rising. We no longer dress in grey.

  On that day I told you about I took my coat and followed her footprints across the ice. As she walked the world froze up behind her. There was nothing for me to return to, if I failed, I failed alone. Despair made it too dark to see, I had to travel by radar, tracking her warmth in front of me. It’s fashionable now to say that any mistake is made by both of you. That’s not always true. One person can easily kill another.

  Hang on me my darling like rubies round my neck. Slip onto my finger like a ring. Give me your rose for my buttonhole. Let me leaf through you before I read you out loud.

  Picasso warms my freezing heart on the furnace of her belly. Her belly is stoked to blazing with love of me. I have learned to feed her every day, to feed her full of fuel that I gladly find. I have unlocked the storehouses of love. On the Mainland they teach you to save for a rainy day. The truth is that love needs no saving. It is fresh or not at all. We are fresh and plentiful. She is my harvest and I am hers. She seeds me and reaps me, we fall into one another’s laps. Her seas are thick with fish for my rod. I have rodded her through and through.

  She is painting today. The room is orange with effort. She is painting today and I have written this.

  The Three Friends

  Once upon a time there were two friends who found a third. Liking no one better in the whole world, they vowed to live in one palace, sail i
n one ship, and fight one fight with equal arms.

  After three months they decided to go on a quest.

  ‘What shall we seek?’ they asked each other.

  The first said, ‘Gold.’

  The second said, ‘Wives.’

  The third said, ‘That which cannot be found.’

  They all agreed that this last was best and so they set off in fine array.

  After a while they came to a house that celebrated ceilings and denied floors. As they marched through the front door they were only just in time to save themselves from dropping into a deep pit. While they clung in terror to the wainscotting, they looked up and saw chandeliers, bright as swords, that hung and glittered and lit the huge room where the guests came to and fro. The room was arranged for dinner, tables and chairs suspended from great chains. An armoury of knives and forks laid out in case the eaters knocked one into the abyss.

  There was a trumpet sound and the guests began to enter the room through a trap door in the ceiling. Some were suspended on wires, others walked across ropes slender as youth. In this way they were all able to join their place setting. When all were assembled, the trumpet blew again, and the head of the table looked down and said to the three friends, ‘What is it you seek?’

  ‘That which cannot be found.’

  ‘It is not here,’ she answered, ‘but take some gold,’ and each of the diners threw down a solid gold plate, rather in the manner that the Doge of Venice used to throw his dinnerware into the canal to show how much he despised worldly things.