The Gap of Time

by Jeanette Winterson

  Then there’s the river. Wide as the future used to be. Then there’s the music—always a woman singing somewhere, an old man playing the banjo. Maybe just a pair of maracas the girl shakes by the cash register. Maybe a violin that reminds you of your mother. Maybe a tune that makes you want to forget. What is memory anyway but a painful dispute with the past?

  I read that the body remakes itself every seven years. Every cell. Even the bones rebuild themselves like coral. Why then do we remember what should be long gone? What’s the point of every scar and humiliation? What is the point of remembering the good times when they are gone? I love you. I miss you. You are dead.

  “Shep! Shep?” It’s the pastor. Yes, thank you, I am all right. Yes, what a night it was last night. God’s judgement on the million crimes of mankind. Does the pastor believe that? No, he doesn’t. He believes in global warming. God doesn’t need to punish us. We can do that for ourselves. That’s why we need forgiveness. Human beings don’t know about forgiveness. Forgiveness is a word like tiger—there’s footage of it and verifiably it exists but few of us have seen it close and wild or known it for what it is.

  I can’t forgive myself for what I did…

  One night, late, deep night, the dead of night—they call it that for a reason—I smothered my wife in her hospital bed. She was frail. I am strong. She was on oxygen. I lifted the face cone and put my hands over her mouth and nose, and asked Jesus to come and take her. He did.

  The monitor was beeping and I knew they’d be in the room soon. I didn’t care what happened to me. But no one came. I had to go and fetch someone—the place had too few nurses and too many patients. They couldn’t be sure who to blame—though I am pretty certain they thought it was me. We covered my wife with a sheet, and when eventually the doctor showed up he wrote “Respiratory Failure.”

  I don’t regret it but I can’t forgive it. I did the right thing but it was wrong.

  “You did the wrong thing for the right reason,” the pastor said. But that’s where we don’t agree. It may sound like we’re just tossing the words around here, but there is a big difference. He means it is wrong to take a life but that I did it to end her suffering. I believe it was right to take her life. We were married. We were one flesh. But I did it for the wrong reason and I knew that soon enough. I didn’t do it to end my wife’s pain; I did it to end my own.

  “Stop thinking about it, Shep,” says the pastor.

  —

  After church I went home. My son was watching TV. The baby was awake, very quiet, wide eyes on the ceiling where the light made shadow bars through the slatted blinds. I picked her up and let myself out again and headed for the hospital. The baby was warm and easy to carry. Lighter than my son had been when he was born. My wife and I had just moved to New Bohemia. We believed in everything—the world, the future, God, peace and love, and, most of all, each other.

  As I walked down the street carrying the baby I fell into a gap of time, where one time and another become the same time. My body straightened, my step lengthened. I was a young man married to a beautiful girl and suddenly we were parents. “Hold the baby’s head,” she said as I carried him, my hand enfolding his life.

  That week after he was born, we couldn’t get out of bed. We slept and ate with our baby lying between us on his back. We spent the whole week just staring at him. We had made him. With no skills and no training, no college diploma and no science dollars, we had made a human being. What is this crazy, reckless world where we can make human beings?

  Don’t go.

  What’s that you say, mister?

  I’m sorry, I was daydreaming.

  Fine looking baby.

  Thank you.

  The woman walks on. I find I am standing in the middle of the busy street holding a sleeping baby and talking to myself. But I’m not talking to myself. I am talking to you. Still. Always. Don’t go.

  See what I mean about memory? My wife no longer exists. There is no such person. Her passport has been cancelled. Her bank account is closed. Someone else is wearing her clothes. But my mind is full of her. If she had never lived and my mind was full of her they’d lock me up for being delusional. As it is, I am grieving.

  I discover that grief means living with someone who is not there.

  Where are you?

  Engine roar of a motorcycle. Cars with their windows down and the radio on. Kids on skateboards. A dog barking. The delivery truck unloading. Two women arguing on the sidewalk. Everybody on their cellphone. A guy on a box shouting, EVERYTHING MUST GO.

  That’s fine by me. Take it all away. The cars, the people, the goods for sale. Strip it back to the dirt under my feet and the sky over my head. Turn off the sound. Blank the picture. Nothing in between us now. Will I see you walking towards me at the end of the day? The way you did, the way we both did, dead tired, coming home from work? Look up and we see each other, first far away, then near? The energy of you in human form again. The atomic shape of your love.

  “It’s nothing,” she said, when she knew she was dying.

  Nothing? Then the sky is nothing and the earth is nothing and your body is nothing and our lovemaking is nothing…

  She shook her head. “Death is the least important thing in my life. What difference will it make? I won’t be here.”

  “I will be here,” I said.

  “That’s the cruelty,” she said. “If I could live my death for you I would.”

  “CLOSING-DOWN SALE. EVERYTHING MUST GO.”

  It’s gone already.

  I reached the street where the hospital stands. There’s the BabyHatch. Just then the baby I’m carrying wakes up and I feel her move. We look at each other, her unsteady blue eyes finding my dark gaze. She lifts up one tiny hand, small as a flower, and touches the rough stubble of my face.

  The cars come and the cars go between me and my crossing the street. The anonymous always-in-motion world. The baby and I stand still, and it’s as if she knows that a choice has to be made.

  Or does it? The important things happen by chance. Only the rest gets planned.

  I walked round the block thinking I’d think about it, but my legs were heading home, and sometimes you have to accept that your heart knows what to do.

  —

  When I got back my son was watching the TV news. Last night’s storm update and personal stories. The usual government officials saying the usual things. Then there was another call for witnesses to come forward. The dead man. The man was Anthony Gonzales, Mexican. Passport found on the body. Robbery. Homicide. Nothing unusual about that in this city except for the weather.

  But there was something unusual. He left the baby.

  “You don’t know that, Dad.”

  “I know what I know.”

  “We should tell the cops.”

  How did I raise a son who trusts the cops? My son trusts everyone. I worry about him. I shake my head. He points at the baby.

  “If you’re not calling the cops, what are you gonna do with her?”

  “Keep her.”

  My son looks at me in disbelief and dismay. I can’t keep a newborn child. It’s illegal. But I don’t care about that. Help of the helpless. Can’t I be that person?

  I have fed her and changed her. I bought what I needed from the store on the way home. If my wife were alive, she’d do what I’m doing. We would do this together.

  It’s as though I’ve been given a life for the one I took. That feels like forgiveness to me.

  There was an attaché case with the child—like preparing her for a career in business. The case is locked. I tell my son that if we can locate her parents, we’ll do that. So we open the case.

  Clo’s face looks like a bad actor’s in a budget sitcom. His eyes bulge. His jaw drops.

  “Seven days of Creation,” says Clo. “Is that stuff real?”

  Crisp, packed, stacked notes like a prop from a gangster movie. Fifty bundles. Ten thousand dollars in every bundle.

  Underneath the note
s there is a soft velvet bag. Diamonds. A necklace. Not little snips of diamonds—big-cut and generous like the heart of a woman. Time so deep and clear in the facets that it’s like looking into a crystal ball.

  Underneath the diamonds there’s a piece of sheet music. Handwritten. The song says “PERDITA.”

  So that’s her name. The little lost one.

  “You’re made for life,” says Clo. “If you don’t go to jail.”

  “She’s ours, Clo. She’s your sister now. I’m her father now.”

  “What are you going to do with the money?”

  —

  We moved to a new neighbourhood where we weren’t known. I sold my apartment and I used that money and the cash in the case to buy a piano bar called the Fleece. It was a Mafia place and they needed to get out so they were fine about the cash. No questions. I put the diamonds in a bank box in her name until she turns eighteen.

  I played the song and I taught it to her. She was singing before she could talk.

  I am learning to be a father and a mother to her. She asks about her mother and I say we don’t know. I have always told her the truth—or enough of it. And she is white and we are black so she knows she was found.

  The story has to start somewhere.

  There was a man lived in an airport.

  Leo and his son, Milo, were looking out of the full-length window in Leo’s London office towards City Airport and the Thames Estuary. Milo liked to watch the planes taking off. He was nine and he knew all the departure and arrival times by heart. There was a big chart on the office wall of the routes served by the airport—lines of arterial red like a body-map of the world.

  “So is this man a Wanted Man?” asked Leo.

  “Nobody wants him,” said Milo. “He’s run away and he’s on his own. That’s why he lives in the airport.”

  Leo explained that a wanted man isn’t the same as a man who is wanted. “It means the police are after him.”

  Milo thought about this. He was writing a story for school. The teacher had told them to try and write an opening line that contained all the rest of the story—like in a fairy tale that starts “A King had Three Sons” or “There was an Ogre who loved a Princess.”

  “He’s not a murderer, this man who lives in the airport,” said Milo. “But he hasn’t got a home.”

  “Why not?” asked Leo.

  “He’s poor,” said Milo.

  “Maybe he should work harder,” said Leo, “then instead of living at the airport he could afford to catch a plane. Look—British Airways to New York City via Shannon.”

  They watched the plane rise from the runway like an impossible bird.

  “When the dinosaurs became extinct,” said Leo, “they didn’t really die, they went into hiding until they could come back as aeroplanes.”

  Milo smiled. Leo ruffled his hair. Leo’s softness was here, with his son.

  “When we die, do we go into hiding until we can come back as something else?” asked Milo.

  “Your mother thinks so because she is a Buddhist. You should talk to her about that.”

  “But what do you think?” said Milo. “Look, CityFlyer to Paris.”

  “I never think about it,” said Leo. “Take my advice: don’t think about anything you don’t have to think about.”

  —

  Leo had been fired from his bank the year Milo turned four: 2008 was the year of the global crisis and Leo had helped it along, accumulating what his CEO termed “reckless losses.” Leo thought this was unfair. Everything he did with money was reckless, but no one wanted to fire him for his reckless profits.

  As he left the bank for the last time, in his chalk-stripe Hugo Boss suit and Lobb shoes, some anti-capitalist kids demonstrating outside had thrown eggs at him. Leo stood for a moment, looking down at the omelette of his suit. Then he tore off his jacket and grabbed two of the kids, throwing them down onto the pavement. He punched a third against the wall and broke his nose.

  Another of the kids was videoing the whole thing and Leo was arrested the next day. His CEO identified him from the footage.

  Leo was convicted of common assault, but his lawyer got him off a jail sentence on the grounds of diminished responsibility (being fired) and provocation (eggs). In any case, his victims were unemployed troublemakers. No one seemed to notice that Leo was unemployed too.

  It was the unfairness of it all that Leo resented as he paid his fine and court costs. Leo hadn’t invented capitalism—his job was to make money inside a system that was about making money. That meant losing money too; the crash was really a game called musical chairs—while the music was playing no one cared that there weren’t enough chairs. Who wants to sit down when you can dance? In the past he had lost amounts the size of a small country’s GDP but he always had time to get it back and more. When the music stopped he had—temporarily—leveraged all his chairs.

  After three months drinking himself into a rehab clinic, and three weeks drying himself out, he had been advised to seek counselling for loss of self-esteem.

  For six months twice a week he took a cab from his home in Little Venice to a well-known Eastern European analyst in Hampstead. He hated the soft-clicking door into the therapy room. He hated the kelim sofas and the clock and the box of tissues. He hated the fact—two facts actually, one for each foot—that the analyst wore black socks and brown sandals and kept talking about what he pronounced as AMBI-VAYLENCE.

  “You love your mother and you hate her,” said Dr. Wartz.

  “No,” said Leo. “I hate her.”

  “It is a metter ov the gud brist and the bad brist.”

  Leo thought about breasts while the analyst was talking about Melanie Klein. The following week Leo brought a copy of Nuts magazine to his session. He gave Dr. Wartz a Sharpie and asked him to circle the good breasts and put an X across the bad breasts.

  “Objectification of the simultaneously loathed and loved object,” said Dr. Wartz.

  Leo remembered that Dr. Wartz had written an important book called Objectifying the Object. He began to drift over a brief History of the Object in History because he was learning that a word has to be used twice over to sound smart.

  First there were no objects—just energy. Then after Big Bang or Creation, depending on your point of view, the world itself became an object (a meta-object?) filled with other objects. These needed to be named—the Naming of Objects. Later on, quite a lot of objects were invented: the Invention of Objects. Then, he supposed, with wars and general human idiocy, there was the Destruction of Objects.

  And there were Objects of Desire. His stomach tightened.

  Then he thought of inventories, archives, stock sheets, catalogues, lists, taxonomy: the Index of Objects. There was a book his wife liked, by some American writer, called The Safety of Objects. Leo himself knew all about the Status of Objects, by which he meant Objects of Status, like his helicopter (sold). Since quantum theory there was the Oddness of Objects, and, if you were a deep thinker, the Meaning of Objects. And what about the Meaninglessness of Objects?

  Yes. When you had so much money that you could buy anything, everything, then you could know what Buddha and Christ knew: that worldly goods were worthless. It entertained him that this knowledge could be got by going in exactly the opposite direction to the great spiritual traditions of the world.

  He said, “Can you ever really know another human being?”

  “You cannot separate the observer and the observed,” said Dr. Wartz.

  —

  But you can, thought Leo, back in his office. That is what a surveillance system is for.

  —

  Soon Leo realised that he did not need to pay £500 a week for two sessions of fifty minutes to understand that he had not been loved as a child. Or that he had filled the emptiness with “Grosz Gain,” as the doctor put it.

  “We all self-medicate,” said Leo to Dr. Wartz. “I do it with money. The drinking was a reaction. I’m over it now.”

  Leo lef
t therapy, gave up drinking and started his own hedge fund specialising in leveraged brokered buy-outs of businesses that could be asset-stripped and loaded with debt, making a good profit for his investors, and, of course, himself. He called it Sicilia because he liked that it sounded just a little bit Mafia. He was Italian on his mother’s side.

  Sicilia soon had £600 million of managed funds and Leo was going for the billion. There was nothing better than cash shortages on the ground for making money out of thin air.

  —

  Back in his office Leo saw that he had confused Milo. Milo was darker and more reflective than his father—more like his mother. Father and son came together over simpler things than life and death. Leo took Milo to football and swimming. He didn’t do homework with him or read to him—MiMi did those things.

  “Mummy will be here soon,” said Leo, for want of anything better to say.

  “Shall I go and write my story?” said Milo.

  Leo nodded. “Take your school bag into the kitchen—get some milk and one chocolate biscuit, OK?”

  Milo liked his father’s offices. There were always people to make a fuss of him and things to eat, and best of all there were the planes.

  Leo hugged Milo. They loved each other. That was real. Milo was all right again now. “There was a man lived in an airport,” he said, going out.

  Leo turned back to his desk—made by Linley out of long planks of Russian birchwood sanded fine as glass. The office was white space: virgin walls, polar leather sofa, Eskimo carpet. There was a big blown-up black and white photo of his wife on the wall. He kept the digital version as his iPhone screen. The only colour came from a red neon wall sign designed by Tracey Emin.

  The neon said “RISK=VALUE.” It was part of a quote Leo had seen at an OCCUPY demonstration: What You Risk Reveals What You Value. The quote had bothered him until he changed it. When he started his new company he had commissioned the neon.

  —

  Leo leaned forward into his intercom. “Web-Cameron! I want to talk to you!”

  Leo was laughing at his own joke when Cameron closed the door. Cameron was ex-army. He knew how to take an order.