So why not propose something different?
But to return to the Dog-Woman. She is a lost soul. She will never be found. Her lostness is part of her glory and she glories in it. She is a magnificent misfit. She howls on the banks of the Thames beside her dogs. She barges through life, alternately terrorising and mourning. And in my version of history, she is responsible for the Great Fire of London.
Why not? Just burn it down.
But it is love, not revenge, that occupies her thoughts.
WHAT IS LOVE?
On the morning after our arrival at Wimbledon I awoke in a pool of philosophic thought, though comforted by Jordan’s regular breathing and the snorts of my thirty dogs.
I am too huge for love. No one, male or female, has ever dared to approach me. They are afraid to scale mountains.
I wonder about love because the parson says that only God can truly love us and the rest is lust and selfishness.
In church, there are carvings of a man with his member swollen out like a marrow, rutting a woman whose teats swish the ground like a cow before milking. She has her eyes closed and he looks up to Heaven, and neither of them notice the grass is on fire.
The parson had these carvings done especially so that we could contemplate our sin and where it must lead.
There are women too, hot with lust, their mouths sucking at each other, and men grasping one another the way you would a cattle prod.
We file past every Sunday to humble ourselves and stay clean for another week, but I have noticed a bulge here and there where all should be quiet and God-like.
For myself, the love I’ve known has come from my dogs, who care nothing for how I look, and from Jordan, who says that though I am as wide and muddy as the river that is his namesake, so am I too his kin. As for the rest of this sinning world, they treat me well enough for my knowledge and pass me by when they can.
I breed boarhounds as my father did before me and as I hoped Jordan would do after me. But he would not stay. His head was stuffed with stories of other continents where men have their faces in their chests and some hop on one foot defying the weight of nature.
These hoppers cover a mile at a bound and desire no sustenance other than tree-bark. It is well known that their companions are serpents, the very beast that drove us all from Paradise and makes us still to sin. These beasts are so wily that if they hear the notes of a snake-charmer they lay one ear to the earth and stopper up the other with their tails. Would I could save myself from sin by stoppering up my ears with a tail or any manner of thing.
I am a sinner, not in body but in mind. I know what love sounds like because I have heard it through the wall, but I do not know what it feels like. What can it be like, two bodies slippery as eels on a mud-flat, panting like dogs after a pig?
I fell in love once, if love be that cruelty which takes us straight to the gates of Paradise only to remind us they are closed for ever.
There was a boy who used to come by with a coatful of things to sell. Beads and ribbons hung on the inside and his pockets were crammed with fruit knives and handkerchiefs and buckles and bright thread. He had a face that made me glad.
I used to get up an hour early and comb my hair, which normally I would do only at Christmas-time in honour of our Saviour. I decked myself in my best clothes like a bullock at a fair, but none of this made him notice me and I felt my heart shrivel to the size of a pea. Whenever he turned his back to leave I always stretched out my hand to hold him a moment, but his shoulder blades were too sharp to touch. I drew his image in the dirt by my bed and named all my mother’s chickens after him.
Eventually I decided that true love must be clean love and I boiled myself a cake of soap …
I hate to wash, for it exposes the skin to contamination. I follow the habit of King James, who only ever washed his fingertips and yet was pure in heart enough to give us the Bible in good English.
I hate to wash, but knowing it to be a symptom of love I was not surprised to find myself creeping towards the pump in the dead of night like a ghoul to a tomb. I had determined to cleanse all of my clothes, my underclothes and myself. I did this in one passage by plying at the pump handle, first with my right arm and washing my left self, then with my left arm and washing my right self. When I was so drenched that to wring any part of me left a puddle at my feet I waited outside the baker’s until she began her work and sat myself by the ovens until morning. I had a white coating from the flour, but that served to make my swarthy skin more fair.
In this new state I presented myself to my loved one, who graced me with all of his teeth at once and swore that if only he could reach my mouth he would kiss me there and then. I swept him from his feet and said, ‘Kiss me now,’ and closed my eyes for the delight. I kept them closed for some five minutes and then, opening them to see what had happened, I saw that he had fainted dead away. I carried him to the pump that had last seen my devotion and doused him good and hard, until he came to, wriggling like a trapped fox, and begged me let him down.
‘What is it?’ I cried. ‘Is it love for me that affects you so?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘It is terror.’
I saw him a few months later in another part of town with a pretty jade on his arm and his face as bright as ever.
Here she is again:
IN THE DARK and in the water I weigh nothing at all. I have no vanity but I would enjoy the consolation of a lover’s face. After my only excursion into love I resolved never to make a fool of myself again. I was offered a job in a whore-house but I turned it down on account of my frailty of heart. Surely such to-ing and fro-ing as must go on night and day weakens the heart and inclines it to love? Not directly, you understand, but indirectly, for lust without romantic matter must be wearisome after a time. I asked a girl at the Spitalfields house about it and she told me she hates her lovers by-the-hour but still longs for someone to come in a coach and feed her on mince pies.
Where do they come from, these insubstantial dreams?
As for Jordan, he has not my common sense and will no doubt follow his dreams to the end of the world and then fall straight off.
I cannot school him in love, having no experience, but I can school him in its lack and perhaps persuade him that there are worse things than loneliness.
A man accosted me on our way to Wimbledon and asked me if I should like to see him.
‘I see you well enough, sir,’ I replied.
‘Not all of me,’ said he, and unbuttoned himself to show a thing much like a pea-pod.
‘Touch it and it will grow,’ he assured me. I did so, and indeed it did grow to look more like a cucumber.
‘Wondrous, wondrous, wondrous,’ he swooned, though I could see no good reason for swooning.
‘Put it in your mouth,’ he said. ‘Yes, as you would a delicious thing to eat.’
I like to broaden my mind when I can and I did as he suggested, swallowing it up entirely and biting it off with a snap.
As I did so my eager fellow increased his swooning to the point of fainting away, and I, feeling both astonished by his rapture and disgusted by the leathery thing filling up my mouth, spat out what I had not eaten and gave it to one of my dogs.
The whore from Spitalfields had told me that men like to be consumed in the mouth, but it still seems to me a reckless act, for the member must take some time to grow again. None the less their bodies are their own, and I who know nothing of them must take instruction humbly, and if a man asks me to do the same again I’m sure I shall, though for myself I felt nothing.
In copulation, an act where the woman has a more pleasurable part, the member comes away in the great tunnel and creeps into the womb where it splits open after a time like a runner bean and deposits a little mannikin to grow in the rich soil. At least, so I am told by women who have become pregnant and must know their husbands’ members as well as I do my own dogs.
When Jordan is older I will tell him what I know about the human body and urge him to be careful
of his member. And yet it is not that part of him I fear for; it is his heart. His heart.
Written on the Body
WHY IS THE measure of love loss?
That’s the opening line of Written on the Body.
What do we do about love? So impossible, so essential, a drug, a lifesaver, the killer, and the cure.
I’m talking here about romantic love, sexual love, only. I say ‘only’ but you know what I mean.
In Oranges I had thought about love between young women, and in The Passion between women and between men and women. Now I wondered what would happen if we didn’t know, weren’t told, the gender of the narrator. How would we read love if it didn’t come with the usual signifiers?
There’s a beloved – Louise – who is married. Triangles are more interesting than straight lines – for dramatic, if not domestic, purposes. Her lover is not named and we know almost nothing about him or her. What we know is the unfolding story of their love affair.
Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain light
I am bored by binaries. Are you? I think of male and female as subsets of a totality. Not quite like Plato’s hermaphrodites – but forced apart by nurture, not nature, most of us having more of the other in us than social norms allow. What does it mean to love as a man? What does it mean to love as a woman? And does the character of our love change if our own gender, or the gender of our lover, changes?
Why is gender so defining in our culture?
I’m writing this in 2017. A lot has changed since 1992 – but quite a lot hasn’t changed at all. Men and women are still judged by different sexual standards. Women who wear trousers are fine. Men who wear skirts or make-up are stared at in the street.
Women have been ‘allowed’ to express their masculine side – mainly because we want women in the workforce, and work is still, somewhere deep down, associated with what men do. If you don’t believe that look at the comments from blue-collar Trump voters wanting ‘real’ jobs for ‘real’ men.
Men have fared less well in expressing their feminine side – they are often a little awkward about house-husbanding, taking paternity leave, or even crying. Feminism gives me hope here, because feminism was, and is, an agenda for change for both women and men. And as Grayson Perry has often said, when talking about his alter ego, Clare, is there really a ‘masculine’ and a ‘feminine’ at all?
Younger people are more accepting of bisexuality or intersexuality, and see more flexibility in what we think of as gender norms, but it would be optimistic to say there is no prejudice, no fear, no judgement.
I wanted to undo assumptions. Assumptions about male and female. Assumptions about desire.
Fiction is a set of possibilities. Those possibilities prompt us towards other beginnings, alternative endings, because to some extent we write the book alongside the author, and we often would prefer a different ending. I was aware of this, and so I left the space for it to happen – and, in fact, for the novel to begin again.
Here’s the end:
THIS IS WHERE the story starts, in this threadbare room. The walls are exploding. The windows have turned into telescopes. Moon and stars are magnified in this room. The sun hangs over the mantelpiece. I stretch out my hands and reach the corners of the world. The world is bundled up in this room. We can take the world with us when we go and sling the sun under your arm. Hurry now, it’s getting late. I don’t know if this is a happy ending, but here we are let loose in open fields.
I realise that all my books have second chances in them – some taken and some not. And Written on the Body is my first shadow-working of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale.
By which I mean loss and its consequences.
That Louise is miraculously alive and in the room at the end of the story is a direct reference to what happens at the end of The Winter’s Tale. We always hope we can return the dead. That time can unhappen. That we won’t be left alone, staring at the emptiness.
We wish we could undo what we did …
None of us lives without loss. Or regret. But none of us need live without imagination. We can learn to see past ourselves.
To write a book without a gendered narrator has caused a few problems. There are problems of translation in those languages that use gendered verbs and nouns – my advice was always to keep switching from masculine to feminine, so that the language itself became a player in the upset of assumption. I don’t think too many publishers took that advice. A pity!
And then there were problems from readers – wanting to know, needing to know, which was interesting and revealing. And then, where the book is taught in class, there have been tutors who prefer biography over imagination and assume that because I am a woman the narrator must be a woman. That’s just sad!
And there have been gay readers who want this to be a gay love story – and it can be if that is what you want, and I have no problem with that – but it doesn’t have to be one.
The great thing about gay culture is how it has challenged heterosexual culture at so many levels. At its simplest, men can now wear pink shirts. At its most profound are questions of sexual identity – the range of sexual expression, the drive not to label anyone according to their sexual choice or destiny.
To judge each other less.
There’s a line in the book – ‘It’s the clichés that cause the trouble. To live beyond cliché is not so easy.’
Fiction helps us to try.
This extract comes early in the novel when the narrator, trying to escape from a rackety past and a nightmare affair with a woman called Bathsheba, has settled with a nice girl who isn’t interesting any more. Sex with Louise has already happened.
I PHONED A friend whose advice was to play the sailor and run a wife in every port. If I told Jacqueline I’d ruin everything and for what? If I told Jacqueline I’d hurt her beyond healing and did I have that right? Probably I had nothing more than dog-fever for two weeks and I could get it out of my system and come home to my kennel.
Good sense. Common sense. Good dog.
What does it say in the tea-leaves? Nothing but a capital L.
When Jacqueline came home I kissed her and said, ‘I wish you didn’t smell of the Zoo.’
She looked surprised. ‘I can’t help it. Zoos are smelly places.’
She went immediately to run a bath. I gave her a drink thinking how I disliked her clothes and the way she switched on the radio as soon as she got in.
Grimly I began to prepare our dinner. What would we do this evening? I felt like a bandit who hides a gun in his mouth. If I spoke I would reveal everything. Better not to speak. Eat, smile, make space for Jacqueline. Surely that was right?
The phone rang. I skidded to get it, closing the bedroom door behind me.
It was Louise.
‘Come over tomorrow,’ she said. ‘There’s something I want to tell you.’
‘Louise, if it’s to do with today, I can’t … you see, I’ve decided I can’t. That is I couldn’t because, well what if, you know …’
The phone clicked and went dead. I stared at it the way Lauren Bacall does in those films with Humphrey Bogart. What I need now is a car with a running board and a pair of fog lights. I could be with you in ten minutes Louise. The trouble is that all I’ve got is a Mini belonging to my girlfriend.
We were eating our spaghetti. I thought, As long as I don’t say her name I’ll be all right. I started a game with myself, counting out on the cynical clock face the extent of my success. What am I? I feel like a kid in the examination room faced with a paper I can’t complete. Let the clock go faster. Let me get out of here. At 9 o’clock I told Jacqueline I was exhausted. She reached over and took my hand. I felt nothing. And then there we were in our pyjamas side by side and my lips were sealed and my cheeks must have been swelling out like a gerbil’s because my mouth was full of Louise.
I don’t have to tell you where I went the next day.
During the night I had a lurid dream ab
out an ex-girlfriend of mine who had been heavily into papier-mâché. It had started as a hobby; and who shall object to a few buckets of flour and water and a roll of chicken wire? I’m a liberal and I believe in free expression. I went to her house one day and poking out of the letter-box just at crotch level was the head of a yellow and green serpent. Not a real one but livid enough with a red tongue and silver foil teeth. I hesitated to ring the bell. Hesitated because to reach the bell meant pushing my private parts right into the head of the snake. I held a little dialogue with myself.
ME: Don’t be silly. It’s a joke.
I: What do you mean it’s a joke? It’s lethal.
ME: Those teeth aren’t real.
I: They don’t have to be real to be painful.
ME: What will she think of you if you stand here all night?
I: What does she think of me anyway? What kind of a girl aims a snake at your genitals?
ME: A fun-loving girl.
I: Ha Ha.
The door flew open and Amy stood on the mat. She was wearing a kaftan and a long string of beads. ‘It won’t hurt you,’ she said. ‘It’s for the postman. He’s been bothering me.’
‘I don’t think it’s going to frighten him,’ I said. ‘It’s only a toy snake. It didn’t frighten me.’
‘You’ve nothing to be frightened of,’ she said. ‘It’s got a rat-trap in the jaw.’ She disappeared inside while I stood hovering on the step holding my bottle of Beaujolais Nouveau. She returned with a leek and shoved it in the snake’s mouth. There was a terrible clatter and the bottom half of the leek fell limply on to the mat. ‘Bring it in with you, will you?’ she said. ‘We’re eating it later.’
I awoke sweating and chilled. Jacqueline slept peacefully beside me, the light was leaking through the old curtains. Muffled in my dressing gown, I went into the garden, glad of the wetness suddenly beneath my feet. The air was clean with a hint of warmth and the sky had pink clawmarks pulled through it. There was an urban pleasure in knowing that I was the only one breathing the air. The relentless in-out-in-out of millions of lungs depresses me. There are too many of us on this planet and it’s beginning to show. My neighbour’s blinds were down. What were their dreams and nightmares? How different it would be to see them now, slack in the jaw, bodies open. We might be able to say something truthful to one another instead of the usual rolled-up Goodmornings.
Love Page 4