For most of my life I have behaved in much the same way because that is what I learned about love. Add to that my own wildness and intensity and love becomes pretty dangerous. I never did drugs, I did love – the crazy reckless kind, more damage than healing, more heartbreak than health. And I fought and hit out and tried to put it right the next day. And I went away without a word and didn’t care.
Love is vivid. I never wanted the pale version. Love is full strength. I never wanted the diluted version. I never shied away from love’s hugeness but I had no idea that love could be as reliable as the sun. The daily rising of love.
The Gap of Time
THE GAP OF time is a cover version of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. It was commissioned by the Hogarth Press as part of their Shakespeare celebrations for the 400th anniversary of his death in 2016.
It never occurred to me to work with any other play; not because I don’t know them and love them – probably I go back to Shakespeare more than any other writer – but because this one has so many personal connections. Or do I mean personal obsessions?
Time. Second Chances. Forgiveness. Love (always love). And …
At the shining centre of the play is an abandoned child. And I am.
As an adopted child, I was always trying to get a reading of myself. Foundling stories of every kind were signs, symbols, symmetries and clues. Often the child left to chance becomes the key to what happens next in the larger drama – but in non-linear time, ‘next’ can signify backwards as well as forwards. We imagine that the future depends on the past. In The Winter’s Tale the past depends on the future. Time’s arrow shoots both ways until that which is lost is found.
But time’s not an arrow, is it?
Time is a boomerang.
The past keeps returning until we nail it.
My version of Shakespeare’s story is set now. I didn’t want Leontes to be King of Sicilia, but he had to be an Alpha Male who does what he likes, and who is reckless with the lives of others. So I made him a banker called Leo who runs Sicilia, a hedge fund. His wife, MiMi, is a singer, as a nod to the fact that the play itself is full of songs. Polixenes, Leontes’s best friend and supposed seducer of Hermione (MiMi), becomes Xeno. Xeno is a gay man. A video-game designer living in New Bohemia, a fictional city in America, based on New Orleans.
In my story the two boys were sent to boarding school together by their divorcing families. This at least gives us a sense of their shared damage and shared experience.
Shakespeare gives us no back story to any of his characters in The Winter’s Tale. We see a long friendship between two men, a possessive marriage, a jealous husband.
But we see, too, a friendship between Hermione and Polixenes that is intimate and playful. I wanted to preserve that friendship in my version – so I had Xeno sent by Leo to woo MiMi back to him after their first parting.
MiMi and Xeno find there is an attraction. Neither acts on it.
IT WAS AUGUST. The banks of the Seine had been transformed into a seaside fantasy, part plage, part stalls of street food and pop-up bars. The weather was hot. People were easy.
Leo had sent Xeno to ask MiMi to give him another chance.
‘I’ll mess it up if I see her. You explain.’
‘What do you want me to say?’
‘I don’t know! The long form of “I love you.”
Leo gave Xeno a piece of paper in his bad handwriting. ‘This is the long form.’
Xeno looked at it. He nearly laughed, but his friend was so hangdog and anxious that he just nodded while he was reading.
‘I’ve been working on it,’ said Leo.
1 Can I live without you? Yes.
2 Do I want to? No.
3 Do I think about you often? Yes.
4 Do I miss you? Yes.
5 Do I think about you when I am with another woman? Yes.
6 Do I think that you are different to other women? Yes.
7 Do I think that I am different to other men? No.
8 Is it about sex? Yes.
9 Is it only about sex? No.
10 Have I felt like this before? Yes and no.
11 Have I felt like this since you? No.
12 Why do I want to marry you? I hate the idea of you marrying someone else.
13 You are beautiful.
So when they had walked awhile and stopped for water at a bar selling I’eau in fancy blue bottles, Xeno got out the piece of paper and gave it to MiMi. She started laughing. ‘No, listen,’ said Xeno, ‘he’s awkward but he means it. This is his way of being sure.’
MiMi shook her head. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Then say yes,’ said Xeno.
‘Pourquoi?’
They walked on. They talked about life as flow. About nothingness. About illusion. About love as a theory marred by practice. About love as practice marred by theory. They talked about the impossibility of sex. Was sex different for men? With men? What did it feel like to fall in love? To fall out of love?
‘There’s a theory,’ said Xeno, ‘the Gnostics started it as a rival to Christianity right back at the start; this world, ours, was created Fallen, not by God, who is absent, but by a Lucifer-type figure. Some kind of dark angel. We didn’t sin, or fall from grace, it wasn’t our fault. We were born this way. Everything we do is falling. Even walking is a kind of controlled falling. But that’s not the same as failing. And if we know this (gnosis) the pain is easier to bear.’
‘The pain of love?’
‘What else is there? Love. Lack of love. Loss of love. I never bought into status and power – even fear of death – as independent drivers. The platform we stand on, or fall from, is love.’
‘That is romantic for a man who never commits.’
‘I like the idea,’ said Xeno. ‘But I like the idea of living on the moon too. Sadly, it’s 293,000 miles away and has no water.’
‘But you have come here to see me because you want me to marry Leo.’
‘I’m just the messenger.’
They walked to a restaurant in a triangle where some boys were playing boules. A man was exercising two Dalmatians, throwing a red tennis ball. Black and white and red. Black and white and red. The evening was cooling.
They ordered artichokes and haddock. Xeno sat beside MiMi while she talked him through the menu.
‘What about you?’ MiMi asked Xeno.
‘I’m moving to America – the gaming work is there.’
‘But you’ll be around?’
‘I’ll always be around.’
What would it be like if we didn’t have a body? If we communicated as spirits do? Then I wouldn’t notice the smile of you, the curve of you, the hair that falls into your eyes, your arms on the table, brown with faint hairs, the way you hook your boots on the bar of the chair, that my eyes are grey and yours are green, that your eyes are grey and mine are green, that you have a crooked mouth, that you are petite but your legs are long like a sentence I can’t finish, that your hands are sensitive, and the way you sit close to me to read the menu so that I can explain what things are in French, and I love your accent, the way you speak English, and never before has anyone said ‘’addock’ the way you say it, and it is no longer a smoked fish but a word that sounds like (the word that comes to mind and is dismissed is love). Do you always leave your top button undone like that? Just one button? So that I can imagine your chest from the animal paw of hair that I can see? She’s not a blonde. No. I think her hair is naturally dark but I like the way she colours it in sections and the way she slips off her shoes under the table. Disconcerting, the way you look at me when we talk. What were we talking about?
She ordered a baba au rhum and the waiter brought the St James rum in a bottle and plonked it on the table.
She said, ‘Sometimes I’m Hemingway: 11am a Chamberry kir with oysters. Later, for inspiration, a rum St James. It’s a brute.’
Xeno sniffed it. Barbecue fuel. But he poured a shot anyway.
She drank her coffee. A
couple walked by fighting about the dry-cleaning. You meet someone and you can’t wait to get your clothes off. A year later and you’re fighting about the dry-cleaning. The imperfections are built into the design.
But then, thought Xeno, beauty isn’t beauty because it’s perfect.
MiMi was sitting with her knees up, bare legs, her eyes like fireflies.
Xeno smiled: what was number 13 on Leo’s list? You are beautiful.
They walked hand in hand back to the apartment on Saint Julien le Pauvre.
The staircase was dark. Xeno ran his hand up the seventeenth century iron banister that curved up the building as the narrow staircase rounded the landings like a recurring dream and the doors were closed onto other rooms.
MiMi opened the door into her apartment. The only light came from the street lamps outside. She hadn’t closed the long shutters. She went over to the window, standing framed in the window in her blue dress in the yellow light, like a Matisse cut-out of herself.
Xeno came and stood behind her. He didn’t shut the front door and he had such a quiet way of moving that she seemed not to hear him. He wondered what she was thinking.
He was directly behind her now. She smelled of limes and mint. She turned. She turned right into Xeno. Up against him. He put his arms round her and she rested her head on his chest.
For a moment they stood like that, then MiMi took his hand and led him to her bed – a big bateau lit in the back of the apartment. She lifted her hand and stroked the nape of his neck.
On the landing outside, the electric light, footsteps up the stairs, a woman’s heavy French accent complaining about the hot weather. A man grunting in response. The couple climbed slowly on past MiMi’s apartment, carrying their groceries, not even glancing in through the open door.
And then Xeno was walking swiftly down the stairs.
Inside The Winter’s Tale are stories embryonic and untold. On the stage it isn’t possible to run those multiple stories. The action and drama must move forward in the two hours or so of theatre.
In a novel it’s possible to lift those buried stories into view. The form lends itself to interiority and reflection. We get a glimpse of something and we follow it in our minds.
But the drama still has to happen – and the speed at which The Winter’s Tale hits us – like an out-of-control truck – was what I wanted for the opening of the novel. So I inverted the structure of the play so that the opening chapter blasts us straight into a car-jack and murder, one stormy night in New Bohemia. And suddenly there’s an abandoned baby left in a hospital BabyHatch.
Shakespeare has Perdita, ‘the little lost one’, raised by a Shepherd and his son the Clown. For me, Shep and Clo are a couple of late-night black guys who instinctively do the right thing at the right time.
For Shakespeare, recognising time as a player is central to so much of his work. There’s a time to get things right – or disastrously wrong. Leontes – because he doesn’t understand that he doesn’t own time – learns the hard way. Shakespeare’s late plays are about second chances and forgiveness. As I get older both things matter to me more. I’m an optimist but time is short. Getting things wrong is easier than getting things right. I’m aware of how much we need the generosity and patience of others.
In The Winter’s Tale, it’s the women, Hermione, Perdita and Paulina, who pull the thing to rights. They are an interesting manifestation of the Great Goddess in her triple form as mother, daughter and wise woman. The female principle saves the play from the usual consequences of male rage.
And at last, in Shakespeare, the women stop dying in the fall-out of the hero’s soul. Hermione, Perdita and Paulina are alive at the end of The Winter’s Tale. That’s progress.
If there are only four possible endings to any story – comedy, tragedy, revenge and forgiveness – then Shakespeare leaves us where we want to be, as the motionless statue of Hermione steps down to rejoin the flow of time, and to let the past be over.
I altered the ending because I wanted the last word to be Perdita’s. If the future exists, the new generation will have to discover it, like a territory not subject to the violent destructiveness of the past.
It has been strange, in the middle of so much global horror, to work with this play. Shakespeare had had it with the ‘Great Man’ theory of history. The heroes and villains are done. Instead, almost shyly, the women are on stage and the baby – nearly destroyed but saved – has returned.
Here’s the very last part of the book:
PERDITA
SOON THIS WILL become our life together and we have to live in the world like everyone else. We have to go to work, have children, make homes, make dinner, make love, and the world is low on goodness these days so our lives may come to nothing. We will have dreams but will they come true?
Maybe we’ll forget that we were the site where the miracle happened. The place of pilgrimage that fell into disuse, overgrown with weeds, run-down and neglected. Maybe we won’t stay together. Maybe life is too hard anyway. Maybe love is just for the movies.
Maybe we’ll hurt each other so much that we will deny that what happened happened. We’ll find an alibi to prove that we were never there. Those people didn’t exist.
Maybe, one night, when the weather is bad and you are holding my wrists too tight, I’ll take a torch and go for a walk in the rain, my collar up against the wind, and the stars not there in the dark, and a bird startles out of the hedge, and there’s the gleam of puddles under battery-light, and further off the sound of the main road, but here the sound of the night and my footsteps and my breathing.
Maybe then I will remember that, although history repeats itself and we always fall, and I am a carrier of history whose brief excursion into time leaves no mark, yet I have known something worth knowing, wild and unlikely and against every rote.
Like a pocket of air in an upturned boat.
Love. The size of it. The scale of it. Unimaginable. Vast. Your love for me. My love for you. Our love for one another. Real. Yes. Though I find my way by flashlight in the dark, I am witness and evidence of what I know; this love.
The atom and jot of my span.
Christmas Days
WHY ARE THE real things, the important things, so easily mislaid under the things that hardly matter at all?
When I was having a breakdown I came home one night to a cold, empty house and I was too depressed to cook or light the fire. And too broken to sleep.
Christmas was coming and so I decided to tell myself a story.
I learned this years ago, as a child, when my mother, Mrs Winterson, used to shut me in the coal-shed as a punishment.
There are only two things you can do when locked in a coal-shed: count coal, a limited activity, or tell yourself a story. And so I escaped my confinement as many have done before me – by vanishing into my imagination.
That Christmas, then, I thought I would re-tell the Nativity story from the point of view of the Donkey. Nothing special about that, except that I was the Donkey, feeling small, overlooked, unlikely, carrying my own body weight and too much more. In the story the Donkey auditions with all the animals for the job of carrying the Christ Child. Down to the last three, he has to beat the Lion: ‘If He is to be the King of the World, He should be carried by the King of the Beasts.’ And the Unicorn: ‘If He is to be the Mystery of the World, He should be carried by the most mysterious of us all.’
The Donkey says, ‘If He is to bear the Burdens of the World, He had better be carried by me …’
Later in the story, the angels are sitting on the wormy, shattered roof of the stable, their feet dangling over the rim of time. A foot touches the Donkey’s nose, and it turns golden.
I had need of a golden nose.
The twelve stories in the collection are mixed up with twelve recipes. These recipes, like Ruth Rendell’s Red Cabbage or Kamila Shamsie’s Turkey Biriyani, are all food cooked with friends, or personal rituals, like My New Year’s Day Steak Sandwich.
> I put in everything I like. Christmas doesn’t have to be a commercial hijack, but the only way to prevent that is to make it personal and meaningful.
Our lives are losing both the personal and the meaningful. Every occasion to return those values matters. And Christmas is celebrated all over the world by people of faith and people of no faith. It is potentially a time for coming together, as well as a time for reflection.
And, in these dark days of nationalism and unthinking hatreds, community and reflection give us a different world view. One planet. One people. Many different lives.
The book is a celebration of Christmas and a history of Christmas. Here are the myths and facts of Christmas: did you know it was the Coca-Cola Company that gave Santa a makeover in 1931, and turned his green robes red?
Did you know that Puritans in England and New England succeeded in banning Christmas for years because it was too pagan?
You did? Well, just enjoy the stories, then: ghost stories, magical interventions, SnowMamas, speaking frogs and froglissimos, funny stories, spooky stories and love stories, of course. Because everything comes back to love.
TIME IS A boomerang, not an arrow.
I was adopted by Pentecostals and stamped Missionary. Christmas was important in the missionary calendar. From the beginning of November, either we were preparing packages to send to the Foreign Field or we were preparing packages to deliver to those in Hot Places returning to the Home Front.
It might have been because my parents had been in WWII. It might have been because we lived in End Time, waiting for Armageddon. Whatever the reason, there was a drill to Christmas, from making the mincemeat for the mince pies to singing carols to, or rather at, the unsaved of Accrington. Still, Mrs Winterson loved Christmas. It was the one time of the year when she went out into the world looking as though the world was more than a vale of tears.
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