The World and Other Places: Stories

by Jeanette Winterson

  So there I was, with a Sleep magazine on prescription. Yes, prescription. Doctor’s orders dear Sister. It’s my new job, didn’t I tell you about that?

  I know we are walking home by a roundabout route, but after I bought my paper this morning I decided to go to the park and feed the rubber ducks. The real ducks died because so many people were feeding them in the new twenty-four-hour working day that not a drake nor a duck had a moment to itself. Some sank under the weight of soggy bread, others exploded. The rubber variety are much more adaptable.

  The sun shone. Maddeningly, it won’t shine during the night, but we are working on it.

  I walked quickly, purposefully through the dead-eyed crowds taking a breakfast break, until I got clear of the feeding areas and on to a crisp grass knoll. No one ever comes up here, it’s too aimless, there’s no reason to come up here, no swings, no cafe, not even a bench.

  I flung myself down and watched the clouds bumping each other, the break and mend of a morning sky. My body was relaxed and the ordered chords of my thinking mind began to separate into component notes, to replay themselves without effort, without purpose, trailing into … sleep.

  I dreamed I was a single moment in a single day.

  A note struck and vanished. A sounding. A reckoning. Gone.

  I was awoken rudely. Far too rudely. The keeper prodded me with a sharp stick as though I were a beast in a zoo. I opened my eyes and the clouds were gone. A grey face, a dirty uniform, the customary slashes of the barely open lids, and the clenched fist scrawling a ticket.

  Do you remember when park keepers used to spear litter and chat to mothers at the sand pit? No more. These scabrous patrols have stun batons and two-way radios. They clean up homosexuals and sleepers and prefer to be known by their offical tag of Public Space Enforcement Officers.

  Unfortunately mine had fallen over. It happened suddenly. He was punching out his fine code when he toppled forward, face down into the grass. I turned him over and felt his pulse. Now I would be charged with murder.

  He was not dead. He was snoring.

  Carefully, I put his hat over his eyes and made a little palisade around him out of the plastic spokes and fluttery tape the keepers carry to cordon off areas of maximum security, like the rubber duck pond.

  As I went down the knoll I looked back. There was a faint blue gas settling at his head. I’d heard of this but I’d never seen it. It’s what happens when the dreams return.

  Which is what I am. A dreamer. I should write that with a capital, it has a title, it exists. Someone has to do it. I don’t know how many of us there are. My ID card says Civil Servant and I try to dream as politely as possible.

  I dream because you don’t. Dreaming is my job and my dreams are tele-electronically recorded and transmitted at Dream-points around the City.

  When the no-sleep lifestyle was pioneered, it was soon discovered that people functioned better if they had a dream-boost. A pad on the heart and the wrist can electronically lull the body into a sleep state in seconds, but it can’t dream. I can, and if you’d like to try me, last night’s will be on the headset in about an hour.

  ‘You’re working as a Dreamer?’

  ‘Yes, and you’re ringing me in the middle of the night.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I had no idea you were official.’

  ‘Shall I send you a free disc?’

  ‘Oh I’d love that. Mark it private will you?’

  She put down the phone. Tough girls don’t dream.

  Mark it private. The same could be said of the Sleep Bar I go to at the weekends. It’s called Morpheus’s Cave. It’s dark, silent, racked with beds and open arms. I was hoping to find a girlfriend there, groping round with a torch, looking for a nice face. The trouble is, it’s difficult to know how we’d get on when she is awake.

  Tonight I’m trying the Sleeping Beauty. It caters for a younger crowd who just want to drop off for an hour if they’re passing. Maybe I’ll find someone to talk to. Talking and dreaming. Dreaming and talking. All these clocks and no time.

  In my city of dreams the roads lead nowhere; that is, they lead off the edge of the world into infinite space. Under my feet the road quickens, like a moving track at the airport. It is the road itself that carries me forward, until there is nothing under my feet but air. Where to now, without tarmac and map? What direction do I take now that all directions can be taken?

  I dream I am in a square with tall houses on three sides. On the fourth side, the house fronts are a facade, and behind them are the pipes and vents and chambers of the underground railway.

  I want to get down to the railway. I can hear the noises of the trains and the voices of the stokers. The only way down is by a shaft-ladder covered by a glass manhole. I can’t prise the manhole up. I could smash it but I know that I mustn’t. A woman comes out from one of the tall houses and asks me to go away. I tell her about the railway and she says it’s disused. The builders will be coming in tomorrow.

  When she has gone I am in utter despair. How will I ever get down the ladder if the chamber is built over? I find myself scurrying over disused ground, on all fours like an animal, looking for an animal hole to take me away from the topmost world.

  These dreams of mine are carefully screened for disruptive elements. Only here, only now, what is between us is true. You and I, this honesty we make.

  Sleep with me.

  At the Sleeping Beauty I ordered a shot of brandy with a jug of hot milk in it and went to lie down in the Pillow Room. The Pillow Room is where most of the girls go. It’s dark, soft, and there’s a Dream Screen on the wall. When I walked in they were playing one of my dreams.

  ‘That isn’t how it ends,’ I said, before I could stop myself. ‘It was a nightmare. I wasn’t running happily over the just planted earth. I was an animal on derelict ground.’

  A couple of girls got up and went off to the ZZZ Bar. I was left alone with a wide-awake redhead squirreling out the contents of her handbag.

  She offered me a sleeping pill. I shook my head.

  ‘It’s not sleep I need,’ I said.

  She looked disappointed and lay back on the pillows watching the screen. The dream was over, we were in an advertising break, something about quality of life on a new breakfast cereal called Go!

  I rolled over beside her and kissed her surprised mouth. Horizontal contact is strictly forbidden in play-at-it bars like Sleeping Beauty. I moved across a bolster to hide us and let her undo my belt.

  Later that night, walking home arm in arm we talked about opening a fish restaurant by the sea. Holiday resorts are Sleep Designated Areas. The only difficulty is that everyone there is too exhausted to eat. Most go intravenous for a fortnight in August.

  ‘I’m lucky,’ I said. ‘I’m a Dreamer.’

  I don’t know if she understood. Then came the tough question. The question I had been afraid to ask.

  ‘Will you sleep with me?’

  Under the night rug, the star rug, moon as lantern, man in the moon watching over us, dog star at his heels, we lay.

  The planets are bodies in the solar system and so are we. You and I in elliptical orbs circling life. It is life we want, but we daren’t come too close for fear it might burn us away, this life in its intensity. We call it life force, and it is, force enough to push the shoot through clay. Force enough to impel the baby out of nothing into light.

  When I hold you in this night-soaked bed it is courage for the day I seek. Courage that when the light comes I will turn towards it. It couldn’t be simpler. It couldn’t be harder. In this little night-covered world with you, I hope to find what I long for; a clue, a map, a bird flying south, and when the light comes we will get dressed together and go.

  Head to head, she and I, ordinary receivers of dreams. But the dreams are not ordinary. The coded lunar language is only half heard. The Aztecs believed that the moon would tell the way to the sun god. The way of darkness to the way of light. Sign into speech.

  Wi
ll it be so? Let me sleep with you. Let me hear the things you cannot say.

  And so it was morning and I went to buy the paper. I came back to my flat and went into the kitchen to make coffee. I took a cup to the bedroom and that is when I discovered that the bedroom was no longer there.

  I called your name and there was no answer. I stared at the wall, the wall where the door had been, where the bedroom had been.

  There was a noise behind me. It was my landlord.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ I said.

  ‘Supervising the conversion,’ he said. ‘Didn’t you get my letter?’

  He was holding it in his hand. I read it. It informed me that my bedroom was to be made into a separate flat. My bedroom was surplus to requirements. It was quaint, out of date, something like a vegetable allotment in the age of the supermarket. It was a luxury. I couldn’t afford it.

  ‘But this is a one-bedroom apartment.’

  ‘You have a kitchen and a sitting room. What more do you want?’

  ‘I want a bedroom.’

  He shook his head, in regret, in disbelief, offended. I followed him outside to where a couple of men were fitting a new front door into what had been my wardrobe space. There was a large box on the pavement, marked ‘Clothes.’

  ‘Where’s my bed?’

  ‘Don’t need a bed if you ain’t got a bedroom,’ said one of the workmen logically.

  ‘Where is it, and where is what was in it?’

  There was a leer, or a sneer, or a jeer. They shrugged.

  ‘Ask in The Macbeth,’ they said, pointing to the pub at the end of the road.

  I ran down there. The Macbeth is a twenty-four-hour swill bar, a thug trough, a beer urinal. As I crashed through the doors into the pounding fists of the bass speakers, I saw my bed, trussed, trophied, pissed on, stabbed, empty.

  ‘Where is she?’

  Sometimes I think I’ll find her, as though I had never lost her. Sometimes at the draw and ebb of the sea on a clear night, I see her walking just in front of me and I swear there are footprints. She was a clue I tried to follow but I live in a world that has lost the plot. Sleep now and hope to dream.

  Disappearance II

  This morning I noticed there was one room missing.

  In a house like mine rooms can go missing; we close up entire wings during the winter and the house does not fly at all, but sits among the trees, brooding.

  In summer, alight with parties and ablaze with sun, the house is lofty, all movement and voices, hardly a thing of stone at all.

  Nevertheless, it is my house in winter that I love, my house clipped and silent, and me its master.

  You will understand that I do not trouble myself with covering up the furniture or shutting up the fireplaces. Others do that. Room by room the house is quieted for the winter, until only I am its beating heart. Only I, the rise and fall of its lungs, the house and I breathing together in the night.

  It was my father’s house, and his father’s before him, and so on, back through history as though history were a family album. I flick through a few hundred years and come to myself, gene descended, different from the Archbishop, the Admiral, the Viceroy of India, by my clothes not my face. My face could be theirs, it is theirs, just as this house was theirs and now is mine.

  It is not necessary to prolong life; life prolongs itself. The pen they put down I pick up. The wine they bought I drink. Whose hand turns the knob? Theirs or mine?

  When I walk past the family vault and glance at the shelf reserved for me, can I be sure that I do not lie there already? The line between life and death is a couple of inches at most. The width of a door that connects two rooms. The dead are, as we say, on the other side. Indeed they are, the other side of the door, and sometimes the door is open; their hand on the knob or mine?

  My family have not been lucky in love. There is a strain of madness on the female side that has been cargoed in the DNA ever since 1590, when the wife of the Admiral had to be locked in the poop of the Goodship for six weeks for her own safety. Conditions were not of the best and she starved to death. It is not abnormal for a person to go blind before they die of starvation. They found her, filthy, crawling, dark, and so she is, still, holed down inside us, waiting to break out.

  We choose carefully, but the more carefully we choose the more vicious is our disappointment. My mother, as healthy and clean a creature as you could wish for, developed an eating disorder and preferred to take her meals in the stable with the horses. Eventually, to help her, my father let her have her own stall and she slept on straw and ate out of a leather bucket. He had a little saddle made for her so that we children could ride on her back. He called her filly and beauty and treated her as kindly as he could but she had a wild thing’s nature and what should have been soft was hoof. My sister and I grew up with a governess, who is here in the house now, using the rooms like tunnels, blinking her way against the light.

  I am never sure how many servants we have, a house full or none at all. Things are done but by whom? As I walk from room to room the door I did not enter shuts softly, the fire is lit or swept, there is a tray of refreshments, but no one, no one to say ‘Thank you Sir’ or curtsey, as in my father’s day. In the summer it is quite different. We hire staff like everyone else with a large house open to the public.

  But this is not summer. This is winter. The house does not enjoy being violated.

  When there was money, real money, the doors were inlaid with mother of pearl and the box hedges were topiary swags. It was my great-grandfather who made a second fortune out of Public Hygiene. That is, he dug the London sewers. I have a sepia photograph of him in his frock coat and top hat standing beside the great blind digging machine on the banks of the Thames.

  That sewer, the deepest and biggest of its kind then, silted up within nine months. It had to be abandoned. There it is now, secret, hidden, a history trap. The accumulated waste of the past not dispersed and made neutral by the flow of time, but packed and waiting. Waiting for what? Human greed to bury its face in filth. You see, the sewer served some of the most expensive addresses in London. Early plumbing was a child’s affair, without the bends, traps, waste filters, vents, graded outlets, that quietly and efficiently chug away your deposits and mine. Think of straight simple pipes of clay and copper passing from the basin, where Lady Muck bends her head, into the deep sewer. Her diamond earring falls off, down, down into the patient dirt. Think of coins, rings, collar studs in silver, neck pins in gold. Think of teaspoons, medals, watch chains, the boot boy cleaning the boot hooks. Down, down, all down, with the remains of the Clos de Vougeot and the housemaid’s swill.

  This house has its own private sewer system. I live above a minotaur’s maze of brown passages and green chambers. We light our cellars with methane gas piped directly from our ancestral mass. There is a faint smell, not unpleasant, but marked. It amuses me to find my way guided by the last gasp of a good dinner.

  There is talk in the village that there is more in these sewers than sewerage. Yes, I say, Yes. But not only these sewers. There is more in your heart than can be spoken. More in your eyes than you will tell. More in the mind of you than anyone can know. More in the night than darkness. More in the river than can be dredged. What more? The hate, envy, malice, greed, stupidity and evil that lie under the floor of everything.

  If I have secrets so do you.

  My secret life. Secrets scurrying behind the walls like mice in the wainscotting. At night the noises are louder. I have noticed how much talk there is of openness these days which must mean there is a great deal more to hide.

  When I open my house to the public I shut away the precious things. The private apartments are locked. My visitors trail their way through an impassive sanitised game of a house playing hide and seek with itself. When I welcome the paying herds at the main door I wear a suit I never wear for any other purpose. It is a very good suit and it was made for me and it is quite similar to all my suits. Nevertheless it is a costume.


  What do you think? That I am a typical product of my age and my class? Perhaps I am but so are you, and don’t you, when strangers and friends come to call, straighten the cushions, kick the books under the bed and put away the letter you were writing? How many of us want any of us to see us as we really are? Isn’t the mirror hostile enough?

  Hide me, hide me, quiet grave. My face turned away at last. One life is quite enough to bear. Perhaps that is why I never married.

  There was someone once. Someone whose fingers curled and uncurled like a fern as she slept. She slept on the river bank where the water carried her dreams away. I stood at the weir and caught them. I had no dreams of my own.

  On that beat below the house I still see her, her hair down and flowing like the river, her eyes, water-blue. She glistened and shone, my hands were wet, empty and wet, with only the skin of her, her dress left behind.

  Things to hide. The archive is never complete. Certain photographs are destroyed. Certain information is withheld.

  My name is Samuel Wisbech. I am fifty-three. I live in the county of Dorset, England, and have done for three hundred and thirty years. We did some service to Elizabeth the First. That Queen gave us lands and buildings which were for a long time disputed. They are disputed again, this time by some gentlemen from the Tax Office.

  Before we were landed we were at sea. All at sea every one of us, Flemish merchants who settled in London and ran our ships up and down the accommodating Thames.