The World and Other Places: Stories

by Jeanette Winterson

  I think of a see-saw. At one end, life’s accumulations, at the other end, the self. For many, perhaps for most, the balance can be maintained. The not too unpleasant ups and downs of day to day, a little loss here, a little gain there, the occasional giddy soar or painful crash.

  What happens when the accumulated life becomes so heavy that it pitches the well-balanced self into thin air? All the things that I had and knew, crashing to the floor, myself shattered upwards, outwards, over the roof tops, over the familiar houses, a ghost among ghosts. I might as well be dead.

  I shall be treated as dead. The dead have no rights, no feelings, the present deals with the past just as it likes. I shall become a thing of the past, worse than dead, a living dead, to be avoided or forgotten, to be abused because I shall have revealed myself as someone who can’t cope.

  We have to cope don’t we? Get on with life, pull ourselves together, be positive, look ahead. Therapy or drugs will be freely offered. I can get help. We live in a very caring society.

  It cares very much that we should all be seen to cope.

  ‘You don’t look too well dearie.’ It was the vagrant in her bizarre rags, a bright blue plastic laundry bag pulled round her shoulders. She sat on the bench and flicked off the lid of a polystyrene cup.

  ‘Hot tea. Here.’

  I took it. I had seen her buy it just a moment since from the van at the park gates. It was clean and steaming and the sting of it in my throat felt like TCP.

  ‘All alone,’ she said.

  ‘All alone.’

  The boat in the Irish sea. The boat on the glittering day when I had been happy. My mind had emptied and in the centre was a clear circular pool. A diving lake I never dived in because I could never get there through the rocks and rubble of the mind’s accumulations.

  ‘Look at all that rubbish,’ she said, watching the electric van slowly whirr from bin to bin, little men in gloves removing it all.

  ‘They’re taking it away,’ I said.

  ‘Where to?’ she said. ‘It just gets moved around dearie, that’s all.’

  If only the world could rid itself of just some of its contents …

  The January sales. Everything Must Go. But where does it go? And when it’s gone, every last steam iron and every fun-fur bikini, it will all be back again, smugly cloned in Taiwan, filling up the indecently empty shelves.

  If I were Rupert Murdoch or the Sultan of Brunei I could spend my daily fortune buying more and more goods from more and more shops in a race to keep them bare. I could have bulging bodyguards armed with slim powerful credit cards, charging floor to floor, crating up their hostages on Amex.

  What would I do with the silent refrigerators nobody plugs? With cascades of lingerie, unbottomed, unbreasted? With dog baskets, egg whisks, jacuzzi liners, wigs?

  Could I spin the silk back into silk worms? Could I pay the ored metal back to the earth? Could I return the pine to the snow forests, the polymers to crude oil wells deep in the sea?

  Load it up and send it to Mars. Why not? Deep space is a litter-garden of clapped out rockets and abandoned probes. We’ll be going there ourselves soon. Human detritus on its final adventure. I’m no better than the rest. What am I but a piece of cosmic waste worth my weight in effluent?

  The other day my drains were blocked. I noticed the sinister rise of flush-water in the toilet pan, and outside, by the culvert, the tell-tale mixture of paper and turds mashed into a tuna-like paste.

  I cleared what I could of the flies’ picnic and called out those alarming men in fluorescent vans who strap on a gas mask and fire a water cannon into the sewer. Their boots are always caked with other people’s … overspill.

  While I was waiting to rejoin the community of the sanitary I had to relieve myself in the garden. Pants down, haunch squat, out it comes, lob of earth over the lot, presto.

  Meanwhile, back at the drain, strong men swam in a brown flood.

  I looked at the toilet and the yards of pipe connecting it to the drain, and the yards more of pipe connecting the drain to the sewer, and the sewer itself, pipes tall as houses, carrying the end products of family life out to sea, where the same families, for twenty-one days in August, will complain of the stench of themselves.

  We were in a boat and the sea was deep and clear. I’ve seen a photograph of the earth, copyright NASA, taken from the moon. The seas cup the world in blue. The blue-held world rested on light.

  The sea is not dark and dense but banded with light, as if the light could be mined. I’m an optical millionaire, floating on gold and platinum, gold beads on the surface, pale bars beneath.

  I’m as rich as a fish.

  Two pounds of cod. Or a litre or fifty centimetres or whatever it’s measured in these days. These days, these January days, the fish-stall in a swoon of ice, the fishman, glassy eyed.

  Cod Mornay, cod crème, curried cod, cod and chips, cod battered, buttered, breaded, with beans. One thousand things to do with cod, except drop it down your trousers.

  ‘What?’ The fishman looked at me suspiciously.

  ‘Your leaflet on cod,’ I said. ‘Most informative.’

  ‘Cod is beautiful,’ he said, with a vehemence that surprised me. He was raw, thick, muffled, cold, with hands lobster-blue and a wart the size of a mussel under his eye. Why should he care about cod?

  ‘Cod’s my life.’

  ‘Your whole life?’

  ‘Every bone.’

  His wife came from out the back. She had oily skin and sparse hair and ears like flaps and her mouth was pursed in a perpetual ‘O.’ She wore a pale grey plastic mac and a pale mottled headscarf. She was the most cod-like woman I had ever seen.

  I stared at them, standing side by side, in an aquarium of content. Whatever they had, I didn’t have it, and it wasn’t cod.

  I moved away through the swimming crowds and passed a large poster advertising a seminar on THE LIFE WITHIN. I took out a large felt tip and wrote neatly at the bottom, Stall 4.

  Why not? Weren’t they Buddhas in their own way?

  And here we reach the problem.

  I am trying to find a way out, or maybe just an air vent, or a window, a different view that would calm and steady me against this mounting desperation. It’s not too late, even though I am already half out of the ejector seat, losing my grip, breaking up, classic symptoms of a bottled life.

  The problem is what to do about the problem.

  I can’t go to church. I’m not of the generation who simply believe. I can’t put my trust in science either, whose most spectacular miracles have not been to feed the multitude on five loaves and two fishes, or to raise the dead, but to perfect mass destruction and prolong senility.

  On those ratings, God is still ahead.

  My knees will not permit of yoga. I do not have the frame for an orange sari or the mind of the East. I can’t hear the sound of one hand clapping or find peace through twenty years of silent archery. I don’t doubt any of it, but I can’t do it.

  The good life? Buy a smallholding and milk organic goats? Not for me. Nor a boat in the water, though it’s what I go back to time and again. Perhaps that’s where I should start, that image, a boat in the water.

  The vulnerability of it. The insolence. Isn’t that the winning human combination. Isn’t that us, tumbling through the years? To suffer. To dare. Now, the sufferers don’t dare and the darers don’t suffer. Perhaps that’s what’s wrong with us all. Wrong with now, sharded people that we are.

  The boat in the water. At every turn the waves threaten.

  At every turn, I want to push a little further, to find the hidden cove, the little bay of delight, that fear would prevent. And sometimes I want to ride out the storm for no better reason than I need the storm. And if I die, I die, that’s the gamble, the game. I cannot protect myself although I can take precautions. Society can protect me least of all. It does so by limiting my freedom. Freedom or protection. What kind of choice is that?

  In the boat on the wate
r these things are clear.

  What then shall I do? Write my own programme?

  I’ve seen nightclasses advertised in personal creativity and healing. My neighbour has joined one, and now she rolls home, week after week, with a few atrophied crayon drawings and cereal packet poems. She started these classes feeling like a worm. Now she believes she’s king of the world. Is this an improvement or is it new delusions for old?

  In what way am I any better? She is smug. I am cynical. She is puffed-up. I am punctured. I watch her gamely finding the energy to thrash about on life’s greasy surface, while I lie paralysed, croaking about another life I think I can see.

  So what is it to be? Banality of convention or banality of individuation? Shall I choose society’s clichés or my own?

  Is it a step forward to have understood that there is no real difference between them?

  These days, these January days, one Christmas just gone, another only fifty weeks away. I take out my pocket calendar and find that important days are marked in red. How few of them there are.

  Is this my lot, to move blindly on the year’s wheel, accepting what comes, making nothing happen? Christmas to Christmas, holiday to holiday to holiday. Someone who strains forward because the present is so tedious and the past is a handful of snapshots?

  I reached for my fat felt tip. It was green. I coloured in today’s square. Today was important.

  My small rise of jubilation was straightaway wetted with the thought that this was probably what people do in psycho-therapy.

  ‘Who cares?’ I said. ‘The whole world’s a nut house anyway.’

  I walked home holding on to the green square. My little square of sea and I a boat in it. When I arrived at my tall house in between other tall houses, I was afraid to go inside. I was afraid that the tiny sliver of self I had won would be consumed again into the mass man; parent, spouse, teacher, home owner, voter, consumer, bank account number, bus pass.

  But there are no solutions and there will be none. I can’t get a job in Acapulco. I can’t walk away. Just as I must wash, dress, feed myself every day, even though I have done it the day before, so I will have to find, every day, a green square to walk in.

  Adventure of a Lifetime

  We arrived in winter not knowing what to expect. What should you expect, away from home, without information, the telephone lines down and the hotels closed?

  There were four of us, two men and two women, none of us married to either, each of us single or divorced. The women were better at it than us; better at the things which seem to mean nothing … seem to mean nothing … but don’t.

  We had answered an advertisement in a paper. ‘Adventure of a lifetime,’ it said. ‘Send £5.’

  £5. A few Euros. Less than $10. Price of a ride in Mickey Mouse or a bug infested buffet lunch at a boarded up Chinese. The risk was nothing. Why not take it? What you risk reveals what you value.

  I should have remembered that the Devil comes to the farmer on his way to market, and says, ‘Take this bag of gold and all I want in return is whatever stands behind your house.’ The farmer knows that all that stands behind his house is a wormy old apple tree dropping Golden Delicious. The Devil can take it. This is a cinch. He hurries home swinging his swag and what should be between tree and he? His only daughter standing behind the house.

  And the moral of that story is? Well, what do you think it is? To content yourself with lifting swedes when the Devil dangles his twenty-two gold carrots? Or a little warning that there’s no such thing as a risk-free risk?

  I thought marriage was one of those until I read the small print. I was recently divorced and all the grand gestures we made, the ceremony and neon, seem like a funfair in winter; useless, tacky, ignored. The lit-up quality of our life together doesn’t work without a generator. The love has gone. So what was movement and excitement, a bit gimcrack maybe, a bit sentimental, was put into storage for a couple of years and then quietly dismantled. The Decree Absolute came through and I read the details carefully. Everything was there, nothing omitted, except that I am unhappy, which like all important things, goes without saying, I suppose. But why is that?

  The important things. Where should I find them? In the detail, like God? In the risk, like the Devil?

  Adventure of a lifetime. Here is the envelope. The note inside tells me to go by public transport to a place in Scotland I have never heard of and await further instructions. Well what did I expect? What should I expect for £5? It used to be a large white note, big as a flying carpet. Think of the journeys compressed into its tissue weight. I could have ridden it like a Sultan, a princess on my pommel. I could have slept under it for a week. Then it shrunk and turned blue, nearly died I think. Then it shrunk some more, and now, almost a coin, there’s nothing to be had out of it but a bag of fish and chips. The adventure of a lifetime shouldn’t begin with salt and vinegar on its tail. Where are you now, my deep-fried princess?

  I went to the dry cleaners to collect my clean clothes but they had been sold. I took them in before the divorce and I forgot to collect them again. Now, like most things, they are no longer legally mine. The assistant, voice like a bottle of solvent, drew my attention to the small print, as I am sure God will do on Judgement Day, and I will have to say then as now, that my eyesight is poor and I cannot reach the bottom of the optician’s chart, and this will be deemed NO EXCUSE.

  I am inadequate, I know, not to have read the small print, but if it is so important, one of those important things, why do they not put it in LARGE PRINT, like this, so that everyone will see how the details conspire to tell quite a different story to the plot?

  So I have nothing to wear except the clothes I have been wearing for months. In these and by bus I am expected to begin the adventure of a lifetime.

  Since I was a child I have been sick on coaches. Don’t you know that the riotous pattern of cloth favoured by coach firms for their seats is a direct response to the gut loads of vomit retched over them? Why else the mucky swirls picked out in carrot-orange? Why else the base-mix of brown and green?

  In the stretch string compartment in front of my knees are what they call ‘Courtesy Bags.’ I shall be quietly filling these while everyone else is gorging themselves on prawn cocktail and Diet Coke.

  The first hour went well enough until I realised that the woman four seats away was wearing my jumper. I leaned over her, casually, nicely, alarmed at her bosom, and asked her where she had got it from. The jumper not the bosom. She didn’t answer me. She dug deeper with her plastic fork into the plastic flute of her prawn cocktail, the active pink prawns against her active pink chest. I felt faint, the way I do when I check my tiger wormery and see the busy pink mouths feeding on the kitchen waste.

  ‘It is hot in here isn’t it?’ I said as she fanned herself with a Courtesy Bag. Hot, no wonder, swaddled as she is in a pink V-necked jumper that should be in my suitcase and isn’t.

  So now you are thinking that I am the kind of man who buys pink jumpers and what kind of a man is that? I wish I knew.

  I slunk back to my seat and tried to write a postcard to my sister. I wanted to tell her what was happening to me but I had nothing in my hands she would recognise. Not even the jumper she had bought me for Christmas.

  Risk, detail, the small print and the important things. I wrote carefully, ‘Adventure of a lifetime.’

  Second hour: Traffic jam. All drivers the colour of raspberries. Tried to make eyes at a strawberry blonde.

  Third hour: Motorway service station. Fifteen minutes only. Tankful of diesel and fifty-six jam donuts.

  Fourth hour: England spreading out before me like a *** sandwich.

  Fifth hour: Courtesy Bags in short supply. Well-preserved gent lends me a jar. He’s taking two hundred of them to the Mother’s Union in Glasgow. They’re going to fill them with home-made you-know-what.

  Sixth hour: There’s a smell of boiling fruit coming from the engine.

  Seventh hour: Total breakdown mechanical and
nervous. Coach plus fifty-six passengers stranded by blackberry hedge.

  Eighth hour: Karaoke and diarrhoea.

  Ninth hour: Jesus dead. The rest of us to follow.

  Almost everyone and my jumper got off at Glasgow. I was left in the sticky coach that rumbled into the potted night, black and thick and shiny, until a blade of daylight scooped me out. I stood on the Tarmac, suitcase beside me, my molecules over-heated and under-slept. I was nothing. I was everything. I was all I had.

  When I was a child I lost my parents early. I lost them before I had time to find anything else. Now, whenever I am quite alone, no one near me or likely to be, I feel I am back at my beginning. I feel I know exactly how things stand, the important things, at any rate.

  Give away a child and you hurl a message in a bottle. There she is, your DNA, your ancient patternings, a code left for others to decipher, and you won’t be able to read what you have written. You hardly know that you have written what you have written. The plot develops without you. You were the details and the risk but the story belongs to someone else.

  I survived, washed up on the far shore of Bohemia, and if I have any parents, they are the kind wind and the warm soil. If I had any parents I would go to a telephone box and ring them and tell them I am scared.

  The adventure of a lifetime. This is it. Cost: £5. Await further instructions.

  There was a note pinned to a tree. I read it carefully. It said CARRY ON.

  After a little while of carrying on, I saw a figure ahead of me, walking purposefully with a suitcase that seemed too heavy. I caught up with the figure and tapped it on the shoulder. It looked round.