Boating for Beginners

by Winterson, Jeanette

  Naomi knew what her aunt was thinking and she didn't care. She wanted to feel her own pulse beat, her own heart race. Why did they have to pack her off on a sight-seeing tour in the desert when she really wanted to go to Monte Carlo and meet a man who owned racehorses. That was the trouble with relatives; they thought they knew best. She was a headstrong young woman who liked to go fishing and make her own clothes, and although she had no idea what love could really mean she felt certain that she wasn't going to find it in the middle of the desert with her uncle.

  Naomi's aunt sighed and started to clear the breakfast things. She had enough to do without worrying about her niece. There was the laundry and the dishes, and the packed lunches for her sons, and Reuben's clothes to put out, and oh, the hundred and one little things that come with marriage. She liked it, it gave her a sense of purpose.

  When she had gone out of the room her niece gazed into the mirror, trying to decide whether or not she was beautiful. She had a good figure, and was thought to be unusually intelligent, but was she beautiful? This was what she ached to know.

  Soon it was time to join the caravan. She watched the servant boys swing up bales of straw and provisions. One of them caught her eye and grinned. She blushed. He had warm brown skin and a furry neck, but she would not lower herself from her class. She heard her uncle's voice: 'Naomi, are you ready? We need to be well away before dark.'

  'Ready, Uncle,' she shouted, skipping towards him.

  'Really,' he thought, feeling his age, 'she is lovely.'

  Then they were off, rolling across the dunes as the sun spread into the glory that is the desert at dusk. Naomi sniffed the air: it was fresh and exciting. She would sleep that night dreaming of princes on well-muscled steeds.

  The next day, as she ate kippers with her uncle, she noticed that he seemed preoccupied. 'What is it, Uncle Reuben?' she asked with sympathy in her voice.

  'Oh, nothing I hope, just the chance of a storm. But we'll get on as quickly as we can; there's an oasis town a few miles south of here.'

  Naomi felt a rush of blood. An oasis town! She had heard of them, where custom had remained unchanged for hundreds of years, and the men still carried off their brides for a honeymoon of passion behind the rocks. Long before nightfall they reached the camp, the white tents glittering and dignified under the powerful sun. 'You have to watch out for some of these chaps,' her uncle warned. 'They're friendly enough but their passions are strong. Be polite, but remember your honour.'

  The chief came out from one of the tents and made signs of welcome. Naomi was thrilled. She could smell the animals, the cooking, and that different enticing scent of men in the desert. Suddenly she felt very young and asked to go and lie down. Her uncle arranged everything for her and they agreed to meet at sundown for supper. Naomi fell into a fitful sleep where she dreamed anxiously about her wardrobe. What should she wear to make an impact? Every young woman wants her first important entrance to be a success and Naomi was typical of anyone who has found themselves in a Bedouin camp without an iron. Finally, when she awoke she decided on her light silk dress specially designed to resist wrinkles. She matched it with a simple string of pearls and tied up her hair perfectly but casually. After about three hours she was satisfied that she looked as if she had made the minimum effort and achieved spectacular results. She wanted to be thought natural.

  As she walked into the supper tent every eye turned to stare at her, and those admiring but uncivilised men could hardly quiet their admiration. For a few moments their whistling and lip-smacking deafened her, but her uncle bent over and told her to take it as a compliment. She noticed he seemed upset.

  The meal lasted for hours, with every kind of delicacy offered to please her. At last, with the impatience of youth, she got up to take some fresh air. Once outside the tent she was overwhelmed by the menacing beauty of the desert: the timeless sand, the leering palms. She shuddered, and felt a hand against her bare shoulder.

  'Forgive me.' A rich warm voice spoke. 'My name is Roy and I thought you might like some company. I am known to my tribe as a camel tamer.'

  As she looked into his eyes, she knew he was more than just a passing stranger. Far away, the moon rose across acres of quiet sand. The storm had passed and the world lay still. He took her hand.

  'Perhaps you would like to come to my tent? I have a fine collection of Arab weavings.'

  Unable to speak she nodded her assent, and felt safe by his side as they turned from the communal dwellings into the private spaces of privilege. Naomi was used to wealth, but even she was amazed at the splendour Roy called his tent. Everywhere she saw gold and ivory and jewels without price. Roy noticed her surprise and, laughing softly, explained, 'I am more than just a camel tamer, I am also a very rich prince.'

  Naomi felt inward relief. Surely now there could be no opposition to their union? But was she being too presumptuous? After all, she didn't even know if she was beautiful.

  'You are the loveliest woman I have ever seen,' said Roy softly. 'Would you, perhaps, be my wife?' He waited, head bowed, not daring to look at her. He waited for at least five minutes, and still she had not answered. Bravely, he raised his eyes, and saw that she had entirely fainted away. He roused her with the scent of desert thistle, and as she regained consciousness she was saying, 'Yes, oh yes, I do so want that,' and his heart was glad.

  They spent the rest of the night planning their future, lying side by side on deep cushions, but the morning brought a problem neither of them had expected. Her uncle refused his consent. Naomi fell weeping to the floor. She begged him, and promised to visit him regularly, but it was of no use. Finally, in despair, she turned to Roy and pleaded with him to make her uncle change his mind.

  'I do not beg for what I want!' exclaimed Roy, and drawing his sword he chopped off Reuben's head. Naomi watched it roll away.

  'You had to do it Roy, I know that, but we must send Auntie some flowers...'

  Gloria put down the book. She usually read on, followed Roy and Naomi into their new life together as they fearlessly crossed the desert, spurning custom and flouting convention. They were married though, so it wasn't sinful. But this time Gloria wasn't really interested. Could it be that Bunny Mix was losing her hold? Or was it perhaps a stage in her own development? She knew there were stages, three to be precise, because she had read a book by Northrop Frye that said so. Just now and again Gloria's past had been punctuated with serious literature. She had never sought it, had always had it forced upon her at station bookstalls because she was too naive to understand that when a serious work is issued in paperback the publishers always use a misleading cover. And so she knew all about the Great Western Railway because the book cover made it look similar to Murder on the Orient Express; and she understood in their entirety the origins of early music because she had picked up a book that appeared to be a collection of love songs called My Lady Neville's Lute, with a couple intertwined round a set of musical instruments oh the cover. She always read these books, even after the truth had dawned, because she was careful about money and preferred reading to making anagrams out of the railway notices.

  Northrop Frye had written about the development of language through three stages: the metaphoric, where persons and matter share a common energy and are described as an inseparable unit; the didactic, where persons and matter are separate and the inner life (intellectual) assumes ascendency; and finally the prosaic, where we describe what we see and feel without recourse to imagery because we think imagining gets in the way. Gloria had enjoyed the book though she hadn't expected to, and had begun to table her own life according to its premises. And now she had clearly reached stage two, and begun to separate what she felt and what she thought.

  Her musings were broken into by her mother who had noticed her daughter's presence and suggested they have a cup of tea to celebrate the end of her gloomy kitchen. Besides, Mrs Munde wanted to talk about the Hallelujah Hamburger.

  'It may get a bit chilly,' she admitted, resting th
e kettle over the fire, 'but I think it's nice to be in the fresh air. I don't know why we ever bothered with a kitchen at all, not a small one anyhow.'

  Gloria smiled, her mind still caught up in the didactic stage of her development. As usual, Mrs Munde imagined they were communicating. She started to tell Gloria about Ham and her new role in saving the world.

  'These restaurants won't be like any other,' she said proudly. 'Every dish will have a spiritual theme, so that we can think about YAHWEH while we're eating. And there won't be anything artificial, just as our Lord isn't artificial. What with the film you're making and the hamburgers I'm making, we'll have the world to rights in no time.'

  'I'm not making a film, I'm collecting animals. You should know, you got me the job.' Gloria couldn't help noticing how much more fluid her sentences were becoming: she had almost reached the state of continuous prose.

  Mrs Munde looked hurt. 'I've given you a start. It's up to you now. No one can say I haven't done my duty as a mother. I just hope you work hard and fall in love with the right man.'

  'Why?' demanded Gloria starkly.

  'Because only the right man can make you happy. Don't you long to be on the Bunny Mix Romance Show?'

  'Not much.' Gloria was surprising herself again, thinking about what Desi had said about orgasms. If you could have them in supermarkets, then anything was possible. She left early, telling her mother she was out searching for a couple of bears.

  When Rita and Sheila arrived, they were deep in conversation about Marlene's problem. They had spares, but not the right spare. Could they or couldn't they trim one to fit?

  'What do you usually do with the — er — spares?' asked Gloria nervously. She knew she shouldn't be asking but a terrible curiosity drove her on.

  Rita and Sheila glanced at one another, then Sheila said, 'You vegetarian?'

  Gloria shook her head.

  Sheila swallowed. 'You ever eaten sausages from a chain store called Meaty Big And Bouncy?'

  Gloria nodded her head. It was the rival chain to More Meat, and usually cheaper.

  'Well,' said Sheila, 'now you know what we do with the off-cuts.'

  Gloria clutched her menu. Visions of sausage casserole swam before her eyes. Bevvies of sausage and mash danced in front of her. She was assaulted by hot dogs wherever she looked.

  'Never mind,' said Rita cheerily. 'You'll know what to avoid now. It's all part of life's rich tapestry.'

  Gloria didn't think so. Mrs Munde had always claimed you are what you eat. What did that make Gloria? Could she truthfully say on her wedding night that she'd never had a man inside her? More and more Gloria wondered whether there would ever be a wedding night.

  No one noticed her tumult because Marlene had arrived and was clearly anxious to hear the decision.

  'We can do it, but you'll have to come for a fitting.'

  Marlene sighed. 'I knew I could trust you.'

  'And afterwards you go for a complete rest.'

  'Yes, I'll book in at a rest home and take the healing waters, even though it will mean missing the early days of filming — and I so wanted to see you three in your costumes. I'm so happy girls, I truly am,' and she kissed everyone goodbye and set off for the bus.

  'Filming's been brought forward, Gloria,' Desi announced. 'They'll want you on set tomorrow to help with the crocodiles. Noah's determined to do the big scenes in one take and rehearse the extras last.'

  'But I haven't collected any animals yet.'

  'We don't want them all at once. It'll be bad enough when we have to go on tour in that smelly ship. I've told Noah we want a private cruiser. Why he has to tour it beats me. He could just release the movie.'

  'You know what he feels about personal appearances,' said Sheila. 'He believes that the ordinary housewife and the average man in the street need something bright and exciting to polish up their dull grey lives. Besides, we're booked out everywhere; it's going to make a fortune. This is the biggest theatre spectacle anyone has ever seen, and it's got Bunny Mix doing the screenplay and YAHWEH himself helping with the dialogue. How can it fail — the winner of the Purple Heart Award and the Creator of the world brought together for the first time under the direction of one of society's most controversial and charismatic leaders who hasn't been seen in public for fourteen years.'

  'Hey, that's very good,' admired Rita.

  Sheila blushed. 'It's what I've written for the press release.' She went on: 'Look, why don't we all have a Nineveh deep-dish and talk about our lives. Gloria, we hardly know anything about you.'

  Gloria knew that Sheila wanted to be kind but she felt it was too soon in her personal reconstruction to talk about Northrop Frye and what she suspected was happening to her. Suppose they laughed? Making the excuse that she must go and help her mother demolish the kitchen, she left. Desi, she realised, didn't believe her, but she could always explain later.

  By the time she got home her mother had already started on the parlour as well as the kitchen, and Gloria wondered how the bedrooms were staying up. 'Willpower,' said Mrs Munde in an offhand manner. 'If I want the bedrooms to stay up, they stay up. I built them, they're part of my life.'

  Gloria realised that there are advantages to being in the first, or metaphoric, stage of development. Her mother made no distinction between thinking things and objects of thought, and so appeared to maintain an extraordinary degree of control over her environment.

  'Her control is instinctual, though,' thought Gloria piously. 'When I regain control, it will be conscious.'

  Such smugness nearly always accompanies second-stage development. Gloria now no longer trusted her instincts; she was looking for clues and isolating experience. In her case this was a good and necessary thing, because she had read the whole of Northrop Frye and knew that there was somewhere else to move on to when she was satisfied with her separateness. This didn't stop her being tedious though, as Doris noted when they met the following day.

  Doris had seen a lot of development in her time and she wasn't excited about Gloria's, just mentioned it casually while she waxed the stage set to resemble a place without form, and void.

  'I see you're in the second stage,' she sniffed.

  Gloria was startled. How did Doris know? She'd only met her once.

  'Well, you seem more purposeful this morning; something about your stride, the way you hold your head, and you've already asked me five questions in half an hour.'

  'Have I?' replied Gloria, incredulous.

  'Six now, and not one of them about love. It's a dead giveaway. 'Course you were in a fallen state before, not a real metaphoric state.'

  'What do you mean?' demanded Gloria, offended.

  'I mean you weren't poetic before, just sloppy, so it's a good thing you've pulled yourself out of it. Nothing gives poetry a worse name than people who talk drivel, and try and pretend it's got an inner meaning because it's about flowers and love and things. Poetry's got muscle, you were all flab,' and Doris made a disgusted noise with her top teeth.

  Gloria was ashamed; she hadn't realised that Doris could be so astute. But then she was an organic philosopher with a wealth of life as it is lived behind her. Gloria decided to be humble.

  'It's the romantic fiction that does it. I've never really read anything else, except what I've picked up by accident.' And she explained how she was often duped at station bookstalls. 'But I do know those Bunny Mix love letters off by heart. They're different.'

  Doris agreed they were; then Gloria told her how her mother was making the bedrooms stay up through sheer willpower. 'And she's much worse about romantic fiction than I am, so how does she do it?'

  Doris considered. 'She must have a hobby that saves her. Is she interested in anything else?'

  Gloria mentioned the stars, and Doris looked pleased.

  'That's it then: she's joined herself to the great cosmos. Why don't you try and get her to do a degree?'

  Gloria shuddered. If her mother made the second stage too she might take over the wor
ld.

  'I've got to get a move on,' panted Doris. 'They want this set ready for the Creation scene.'

  A group of burly men came by wheeling lights. One of them addressed Gloria. 'They want you down with the crocodiles. We've got to make this place look like a swamp in chaos.'

  Gloria followed his directions, ending up at the swimming pool. Rita and Sheila were already there drinking Piña Coladas even though it was hardly past breakfast time. Gloria sighed. This was the life she had read about. How typical that she should discover it when she no longer cared.

  Desi was getting into a suit of what looked like designer chain mail. She grinned at Gloria. 'They've cast me as the warlike one. I've got to tell the great Unpronounceable what a shit he's being, destroying the happy pagan order and returning us all to the soil so that he can create the world in his own image.'

  Gloria thought back to what she knew about the book of Genesis. There was an explanation on the pagan gods, then a denouncement about how undemocratic they were, then a blood scene where everyone went to war and YAHWEH destroyed the mystically created world and redid it himself in colours he preferred. Then, like a gentleman, he withdrew as gently as possible until the new world had made such a mess of things he decided to intervene again, this time using Noah as an assistant. It was good box office material, providing the pagan world wasn't made to seem too attractive or sympathetic.

  'Sheila's got to wear a false nose,' said Desi, picking it out of the prop box. 'We can't be too glamorous.'

  Someone came running by with a clapperboard. 'To your places please, in costume please, the director's on his way.'

  Rita, Sheila and Desi stood arrogantly under the orange tree that was to symbolise their womanhood. The first scene was entirely theirs. They were to make rude remarks about the Unpronounceable and complain a lot about their dwindling powers. Gloria suddenly realised that she was going to see Noah in the flesh for the first time. She sat respectfully by the crocodiles and watched the pathway up to the house. What she saw was a spherical man with a bright bald head. He was around four feet tall with the blackest, most piercing eyes possible in anything other than a crow. As he walked down towards the pool all the hired hands and technicians bowed and murmured their admiration. The figure appeared not to notice; his gaze fastened on his daughters-in-law under the orange tree.