Fiction has real strengths here. As in the fairy tales, we can fall asleep and a hundred years flies past, or the actions of a lifetime can be compressed into a single day. In fiction, time can accelerate or slow down. That makes it satisfying because everyone knows that, whatever the clock says, an hour with someone you love passes far faster than an hour of boredom in a place you hate.
And I like history. I like writing about the past. The past is not the present as costume drama. Dropping our minds into the past is an underwater experience. We’re weightless, floating in an element not our own. The light is blurry, the sights strange. And that experience is both liberating and unsettling.
As writers and readers we can go where we want to. For me, some fast cutting between one time and another – dropping in a story that’s out of the main action, for instance – gives a breathing space and a different view.
The Powerbook is packed with stories – it’s like having different windows open on your screen.
The writer of these stories, Ali, or Alix – because X marks the spot – will write you anything you like, provided you are prepared to enter the story as yourself and leave it as someone else.
To avoid discovery I stay on the run. To discover things for myself, I stay on the run
And I suppose this book has a motto. I took it from Harold Bloom’s translation of the Jewish Blessing:
MORE LIFE INTO A TIME WITHOUT BOUNDARIES
I like that.
The extract below is a real meeting (I think) after a series of virtual encounters:
THE EVENING WAS cooling. She and I had walked without speaking, back over the Pont Neuf, to a little triangle of grass and birch trees set on all sides with small restaurants. I like to eat here. Someone once called it ‘the sex of Paris’.
I was angry with myself. The afternoon had been an anticipation – I don’t know what for – I do know what for, but I would have been glad and disappointed if nothing had started to happen. If we had gone to the restaurant as planned, and the rest had stayed as a memory whose truthfulness is not in the detail.
The trouble is that in imagination anything can be perfect. Downloaded into real life, it was messy. She was messy. I was messy. I blamed myself. I had wanted to be caught.
We slowed down. She spoke.
‘You’re angry with me.’
‘This is the place – Paul’s.’
‘I said too much too soon.’
‘The décor hasn’t changed since the 1930s.’
‘I don’t hold you cheap.’
‘The women who serve wear white aprons and won’t speak English.’
‘I just want to hold you.’
She took me in her arms and I was so angry I could have struck her, and at the bottom of my anger, conducting it, was a copper coil of desire.
‘And I want to kiss you.’
A man was exercising two Dalmatians under the trees. Spots ran in front of my eyes.
‘Kiss you here and here.’
The man threw them two red tennis balls and the dogs ran for the balls and fetched them back – black and white and red, black and white and red.
This feels like a grainy movie – the black dresses and white aprons of the matrons moving inside the lighted window of Paul’s. Your black jeans and white shirt. The night wrapping round you like a sweater. Your arms wrapped round me. Two Dalmatians.
Yes, this is black and white. The outlines are clear. I must turn away. Why don’t I?
In my mouth there is a red ball of desire.
‘These tiny hairs on your neck …’
Fetch. My heart returns to me what I turn away. I am my own master but not always master of myself. This woman wants to be …
‘Your lover.’
We went inside. I ordered artichoke vinaigrette and slices of duck with haricots verts. You had pea soup and smoked eel. I could have done with several bottles of wine, but settled for a Paris goblet, at one gulp, from the house carafe.
You tore up the bread with nervous fingers.
‘Where were we?’
‘It’s not where I want to be.’
‘It didn’t feel like that when I held you.’
‘No, you’re right.’
‘Well then?’
She has beautiful hands, I thought, watching her origami the baguette. Beautiful hands – deft, light, practical, practised. Mine was not the first body and it wouldn’t be the last. She popped the bread into her mouth.
‘Where shall I start?’ I said, ready with my defence.
‘Not at the beginning,’ she said, feeding me crumbs.
‘Why not?’
‘We both know the usual reasons, the unwritten rules. No need to repeat them.’
‘You really don’t care, do you?’
‘About you? Yes.’
‘About the mess this will make.’
‘I’m not a Virgo.’
‘I am.’
‘Oh God, just my luck. I bet you’re obsessed with the laundry.’
‘I am, as it happens.’
‘Oh yes, I had a Virgo once. He could never leave the washing machine alone. Day and night, wash, wash, wash. I used to call him Lady Macbeth.’
‘What are you going to call me?’
‘I’ll think of something.’
The artichoke arrived and I began to peel it away, fold by fold, layer by layer, dipping it. There is no secret about eating artichoke, or what the act resembles. Nothing else gives itself up so satisfyingly towards its centre. Nothing else promises and rewards. The tiny hairs are part of the pleasure.
What should I have eaten? Beetroot, I suppose.
A friend once warned me never to consider taking as a lover anyone who disliked either artichokes or champagne. That was good advice, but better advice might have been never to order artichokes or champagne with someone who should not be your lover.
At least I had chosen plain red wine.
And then I remembered the afternoon.
She looked at me, smiling, her lips glossy with oil.
‘What are you thinking about?’
‘This afternoon.’
‘We should have gone to bed then.’
‘We hardly spoke six sentences to each other.’
‘That’s the best way. Before the complications start.’
‘Don’t worry. No start. No complications.’
‘Are you always such a moralist?’
‘You make me sound like a Jehovah’s Witness.’
‘You can doorstep me any night.’
‘Will you stop it?’
‘As you say, we haven’t started yet.’
‘After supper we go back to the hotel and say goodnight.’
‘And tomorrow you will catch the Eurostar to London.’
‘And the day after you’ll fly Air France to New York.’
‘You must be a Jehovah’s Witness.’
‘Why must I?’
‘You’re not married but you won’t sleep with me.’
‘You are married.’
‘That’s my problem.’
‘True …’
‘Well then …’
‘I’ve done it before and it became my problem.’
‘What happened?’
‘I fell in love.’
It was a long time ago. It feels like another life until I remember it was my life, like a letter you turn up in your own handwriting, hardly believing what it says.
I loved a woman who was married. She loved me too, and if there had been less love or less marriage I might have escaped. Perhaps no one really does escape.
She wanted me because I was a pool where she drank. I wanted her because she was a lover and a mother all mixed up into one. I wanted her because she was as beautiful as a warm afternoon with the sun on the rocks.
The damage done was colossal.
‘You lost her?’
‘Of course I did.’
‘Have you got over it?’
‘It was a love affair, not an ass
ault course.’
‘Love is an assault course.’
‘Some wounds never heal.’
‘I’m sorry.’
She held out her hand. What a strange world it is where you can have as much sex as you like but love is taboo. I’m talking about the real thing, the grand passion, which may not allow affection or convenience or happiness. The truth is that love smashes into your life like an ice floe, and even if your heart is built like the Titanic you go down. That’s the size of it, the immensity of it. It’s not proper, it’s not clean, it’s not containable.
She held out her hand. ‘You’re still angry.’
‘I’m still alive.’
What to say? That the end of love is a haunting. A haunting of dreams. A haunting of silence. Haunted by ghosts, it is easy to become a ghost. Life ebbs. The pulse is too faint. Nothing stirs you. Some people approve of this and call it healing. It is not healing. A dead body feels no pain.
‘But pain is pointless.’
‘Not always.’
‘Then what is the use of suffering? Can you tell me that?’
She thinks I’m holding on to pain. She thinks the pain is a souvenir. Perhaps she thinks that pain is the only way I can feel. As it is, the pain reminds me that my feelings are damaged. The pain doesn’t stop me loving – only a false healing could do that – the pain tells me that neither my receptors nor my transmitters are in perfect working order. The pain is not feeling, but it has become an instrument of feeling.
She said, ‘Do you still like having sex?’
‘You talk as though I’ve had an amputation.’
‘I think you have. I think someone has cut out your heart.’
I looked at her and my eyes were clear.
‘That’s not how the story ends.’
She put out her hand. ‘I want to rescue you.’
‘From what?’
‘From the past. From pain.’
‘The past is only a way of talking.’
‘Then from pain.’
‘I don’t want a wipe-clean life.’
‘Don’t be so prickly.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘What do you want? Tell me.’
‘No compromises.’
‘That’s impossible.’
‘Only the impossible is worth the effort.’
‘Are you a fanatic or an idealist?’
‘Why do you need to label me?’
‘I need to understand.’
‘No, you want to explain me to yourself. You’re not sure, so you need a label. But I’m not a piece of furniture with the price on the back.’
‘This is a heavy way to get some sex.’
The waitress cleared the plates and brought us some brown and yellow banded ice cream, the same colour as the ceilings and walls. It even had the varnishy look of the 1930s. The cherries round the edges were like Garbo kisses. You speared one and fed it to me.
‘Come to bed with me.’
‘Now?’
‘Yes now. It’s all I can offer. It’s all I can ask.’
‘No difficulties, no complications?’
‘None.’
‘Except that someone will be waiting for you in Room 29.’
‘He’ll be drunk and fast asleep.’
‘And someone will be waiting for me.’
‘Someone special?’
‘Just a friend.’
‘Well then …’
‘Good manners?’
‘I’ll leave a message at the night desk.’
She got up and fiddled with some change for the phone. ‘Wait …’
She didn’t answer. There she was, at the phone, her face turned away from me.
We went to a small hotel that used to be a spa.
The bathrooms still have steam vents and needle showers, and if you turn the wrong knob while you’re cleaning your teeth the whole bedroom will fill up with steam like the set of a Hitchcock movie. From somewhere out of the steam the phone will ring. There will be a footstep on the landing, voices. Meanwhile you’ll be stumbling for the window, naked, blinded, with only a toothbrush between yourself and Paris.
The room we took at the Hotel Tonic was on the top floor. It had three beds with candlewick counterpanes and a view over the rooftops of the street. Opposite us, cut into the frame of the window, was a boy dancing alone to a Tina Turner record. We leaned out against the metal safety bars, watching him, watching the cars pull away. You put your hand on the small of my back under my shirt.
This is how we made love.
You kissed my throat.
The boy was dancing.
You kissed my collarbone.
Two taxi drivers were arguing in the street.
You put your tongue into the channel of my breasts.
A door slammed underneath us.
I opened your legs on to my hip.
Two pigeons were asleep under the red wings of the roof.
You began to move with me – hands, tongue, body.
Game-show laughter from the television next door.
You took my breasts in both hands and I slid you out of your jeans.
Rattle of bottles on a tray.
You don’t wear knickers.
A door opened. The tray was set down.
You keep your breasts in a black mesh cage.
Car headlights reflected in the dressing-table mirror.
Lie down with me.
Get on top of me.
Ease yourself, just there, just there …
Harry speaks French, he’ll pick up the beer.
Push.
Stella or Bud?
Harder.
Do you want nuts?
Make me come. Make me.
Ring her after midnight your time, she said.
Just fuck me.
Got the number?
Fuck me.
The next morning I woke late and turned over to kiss her.
She had gone. The sheet was still warm but she had gone.
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
WHY BE HAPPY When You Could Be Normal? was written in a jolt of energy. In two weeks I found I had 15,000 words.
Why?
Is it a memoir? Not really. I think of it as an experiment with experience. None of us recalls our past as though we had carefully filmed it every moment of every day. And what if we had done? What lies beyond the frame? What was happening in our minds? There is always more to say, more to see, more to know.
I had a breakdown between summer 2007 and the end of 2008. In the autumn of 2008 someone I had loved deeply died too early, and at Christmas of that year my father died too. I buried him in a cold Saturnian January, and cancelled an interview with Susie Orbach, a woman I much admired and yet had never met. By May 2009 Susie and I were lovers.
And I had started to hunt for my birth mother – or Bio-Ma, as we called her.
Why?
Clearing out my father’s things, I found some paperwork – yellowed, typewritten, as ancient as a codex, or so it felt, but really only from the early 1960s. My adoption. Some details about where I had been, and who I had been before that adoption.
I was no longer in breakdown, and Susie was, and is, a huge part of the healing of my mind. With her, I was able to go through the cellular trauma of looking into a past I had written (Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit) in order to own it, understand it, and, yes, to control it.
I knew early, how or why I don’t know, that if you can read yourself as a fiction as well as a fact, you will be freer. If you are a story, you can change that story, especially how it ends.
I know this kind of thinking has been hijacked by the neo-liberal agenda of anyone can be a millionaire, a celebrity, a president. And if you are not what or who you want to be, it is your fault. Social justice and global inequality, class, race, background, has nothing to do with it. Utter crap and we know that.
But …
For some reason my imagination was strong and I was aligned with myself in
crucial ways. For all the fuck-ups and failures, I knew I could write my way out – and I did.
Oranges is fiction. It’s not the story of my life and I am not the Jeanette in that story. That is the point. I became my own fiction.
But …
Twenty-seven years after writing that book, the cluster of happenings I have described – and one I seem to have left out – forced me back towards the material I knew, and forward towards new material I never thought I wanted, or needed, to face.
As a writer I find I am forced towards discomfort, which is not the same thing as discontent.
The title comes from a Mrs W line, the day she gave me the clear choice of giving up the girl I loved or leaving home. I was sixteen. In our gloomy, cramped terraced house, with its body-count backyard (the kind of place where you bury your victims), and where she had operatically burnt my books in a Gotterdammerung of destruction, she asked me why I was doing this (‘this’ being in love, fatally, transgressively). I said, ‘It makes me happy.’ She said, ‘WBHWYCBN?’
I wondered then, and have done for a long time since, whether this was a true binary, like black/white, good/evil, day/night, happy/normal?
It was a good question, if a brutal one, for us to end on. It was a gift, though a dark one, though I didn’t know it at the time.
She was a violent philosopher.
WHEN LOVE IS unreliable and you are a child, you assume that it is the nature of love – its quality – to be unreliable. Children do not find fault with their parents until later. In the beginning the love you get is the love that sets.
I did not know that love could have continuity. I did not know that human love could be depended upon. Mrs Winterson’s god was the God of the Old Testament and it may be that modelling yourself on a deity who demands absolute love from his ‘children’ but thinks nothing of drowning them (Noah’s Ark), attempting to kill the ones who madden him (Moses), and letting Satan ruin the life of the most blameless of them all (Job), is bad for love.
True, God reforms himself and improves thanks to his relationship with human beings, but Mrs Winterson was not an interactive type; she didn’t like human beings and she never did reform or improve. She was always striking me down, and then making a cake to put things right, and very often after a lockout we’d walk down to the fish and chip shop the next night and sit on the bench outside eating from the newspaper and watching people come and go.
Love Page 6