Gut Symmetries

by Jeanette Winterson

  Grandmother always had seemed fabulously old, unicorn old, strange figure out of time. Now she was biblically old, upright as a prophet, sharp-tongued as the Serpent himself. She opened the front door as if it were the Hall of Judgement. Perhaps it was.

  ‘David’s asleep,’ she said. ‘Your mother’s drunk.’

  I went inside and through to the kitchen. It had been carpeted, tiled, formica’d, glassed, and beside the coal range was a built-in gas cooker. I looked around for the rabbit. Gone.

  ‘The Social Services,’ said Grandmother, pronouncing it KGB. ‘They said, “Do it up or go into a home. Not fit for human habitation.” I said I am human and I have inhabited it for more than sixty years.’

  We sat down at what kitchen shops call the breakfast bar.

  ‘I should be dead,’ said Grandmother. ‘I should be dead not David.’

  I listened to her story of what had happened, running it back through my mind to where it had begun. I had seen my father put off his bright self and shroud himself in dead men’s clothes, the pressure suit and pressure helmet of normal life. When at last he was fully dressed in the ways of the world he had pumped up the suit with an inflation of respectability. He had protected himself against himself. His pressure suit saved him from the disruptive forces of depth.

  At the same time he began to corrode inside it. His first crisis, when I was nine, and we had moved to London to jump ship at the death of the docks, re-detonated the action man inside him. He became a cartoon of his vigorous positive self. At the moment of decline accelerate. He dragged himself out of shadow into a twenty-four-hour day. He had successfully made the transition from the old-fashioned values of the post-war world into the edginess of modern life. He was admirable, my father, admirable and brave, and unable to see that the shadow he so feared was his own.

  During the seeming sunshine years his shadow lengthened. Fixedly gazing ahead, my father pretended not to notice. He did not notice that the sun on the sun-dial told a different story to the one he was telling himself. He had to be a hero under a high noon. The light should not waver or wane. He forgot that time processes. Fatally he did not remember that by some loop in its own laws, time can precess. My father got older and younger at the same time. As he became more senator-like, the wild boy, the dock boy, my tug-boat father, rioted, though well below the protection of consciousness.

  He started to complain of a twitch. The doctor gave him tablets. At board meetings, at his most imperious, leading the good men in grey, he twitched. One side of him remained dignified and upright. The other side leapt galvanically. He was advised to take time off. He refused.

  At the Cunard birthday celebrations my father twitched a full bottle of Krug over HRH Duke of Edinburgh.

  ‘A Greek,’ said my grandmother, pronouncing it ‘Who?’

  The board retired him. It was no disgrace. He was comfortably in his sixties and could have chosen to leave on his own account. His chauffeur collected him on his last afternoon as himself, and asked, as usual, ‘Where to, Sir?’

  ‘Liverpool,’ said my father.

  As the Jaguar spun the motorway under its wheels my father wondered why the road should not go on forever. What was his destination? Who was driving? There was the familiar outline at the wheel. Himself in the back assuming he had control. He had made himself passenger of his own life.

  He leaned forward to tap on the window. He wanted to tell the driver that he would prefer to get out and walk. He fell back, shaking himself. Get out and walk? He was going to Liverpool. What was the matter with him?

  ‘Be someone. Be someone.’ His mother’s words tattooed on his body, his secret skin worn under an expensive suit.

  ‘I am someone,’ he said out loud. ‘But who?’

  How he had hated the two up two down terraced house. How he had hated his own father, coarse, suspicious. How much guilty relief he had felt when his father had been torpedoed.

  A year before his father was killed, he had come home after a gas accident in his submarine. What should have been a container of oxygen had corrupted his lungs into a rebellion of mucus and blood. He had recovered but his left side was permanently damaged. The nerves and skin clung to him in a pantomime of life that was not life. His lidded eye, his drooping mouth, the wasted, twitching arm and his leg in his boot fastened so tight that it seemed to be there to hold the leg on.

  David remembered having to sit on his knee and dive for sweets in his dead pocket.

  His father was given a clean bill of health by the Navy doctor who wanted him back in the submarine. The night before he left, he crept up to David, asleep in bed, and bent down, a bandana tied over his face, whispering ‘It’s in the air, lad, it’s in the air. Can you not smell it? It’s in the air.’

  David could smell it. The thick soaked uniform smeared with blood and urine. The stale water. The smell of death and destruction. The smell of a stretcher and a dirty red blanket. If the horror is inside you how do you get it out?

  In the terraced house David learned not to breathe.

  When his father was killed David felt a rush of air in his lungs. He breathed so hard that he feared his nostrils would jam with wardrobes and chairs. His bellow lungs opened so wide his nose could not supply them. Would he die with every piece of house furniture packed into his respiratory tract? He leaned out of the window trying to breathe in the whole sky. In the morning his mother’s bedding plants had been uprooted from the garden by a violent wind.

  He loved his mother. He would be someone.

  David got out of the effortless Jaguar and handed his chauffeur £1,000 in cash. He shook him by the hand, thanked him, and turned away, upright, untwitching, towards the buildings that had been Trident Shipping. His chauffeur reversed quickly and drove away. The car had to be cleaned and ready that evening for David’s successor.

  David went into the old buildings that his mother had cleaned from 1928 until 1978 and where he had started work in 1947. The sheds, stores, wharf-ends and offices had been converted into an art gallery, theatre space and healthy-eating café. David walked across the shiny floors and puzzled over the installation of wire netting and lifelike plastic cod. Out of place among the jeans and baseball caps, the man in the Savile Row overcoat ordered a piece of carrot cake and a cup of strong tea. A group of students glanced over at him.

  ‘Who do they think I am?’ he wondered. ‘A rich stupid old man.’ And he laughed because he had been poorer than any of them and cleverer too.

  ‘This used to be the clerks’ office,’ he said out loud. (The students looked up and then looked away.) ‘There were twelve of us in here. We used to call it the Apostles’ Shift. Every week the company stopped a shilling off our wages to pay for the suits we wore.’ (He paused.) ‘A shilling. Might as well say a doubloon. All in the past. History, I suppose.’

  He thought about it. Getting old was not something he had expected. He wanted to say, ‘Why am I old?’ and although he knew that question had no meaning, it had meaning to him. His body and his mind, allies for so long, had begun to quarrel. And his spirit? Where was his spirit in this new parting of the ways? He didn’t believe in God but occasionally, uncomfortably, he had a sense that God believed in him.

  ‘I am a stupid old man,’ he thought.

  He took out his book. Other People: A Mystery Story.

  He had been attracted by the title because it seemed to him that other people were mysterious, unknown. He got along by making assumptions about them, they got along by making assumptions about him. How much of any of that was true? The students had glanced at him and looked away. They thought they knew what he was, in so much as he was anything at all to them. He had his own impressions of them; lazy, shallow, scruffy, dull. He hadn’t been to university and look at him now.

  ‘Yes,’ he thought. ‘Look at me now. Why not? It tells us nothing we need to know.’ He wished he could go and speak to them. He wished he could say, ‘I am not that man you see sitting in the corner. My name is David.’


  He looked at his feet under the table. He did not see his polished Oxfords and dark wool socks, he saw thick-soled boots with steel tips, heels hooked over the spindle of a clerk’s high stool. A fluffy cotton mop pushed his feet back into the present.

  ‘Mind yer feet, please.’

  ‘Mother?’

  ‘David.’

  He furrowed his face at her. She had not worked here for twenty years. What was happening to him?

  It was his mother, stuffed into her pink overall like a prune inside a wrap of bacon.

  ‘I’m doing the cleaning.’

  She sat opposite him, KGB in her voice.

  ‘Pretend you don’t know me.’

  The students nudged one another and a girl giggled.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ she said. ‘You’ll get me into trouble.’

  ‘I retired today,’ he said, and the words sounded far off. Someone else’s.

  ‘Well I’m still working and if they find out you’re my son I’ll lose my job.’

  ‘Why?’ He didn’t understand.

  ‘Look at the age of you. I told them I was sixty-one.’

  Sixty-one. Sixty-one. She was nearly ninety. Anyone could see that she was nearly ninety. Her stomach had slipped to her thighs. Her breasts had slipped to her stomach. Her neck was in her vest. Her chin was in her neck and her eyes had receded so far into her hollow skull that from the camouflage of her thin hair she should have been able to see backwards.

  ‘You look nothing like sixty-one.’

  She simpered and blushed. ‘You always were a good son.’

  ‘Let me take you home.’

  ‘If you want to wait you can. I finish at six o’clock.’

  Six o’clock. He stood in the dismal staff room while his mother hung up her pink overall in the grey metal locker. She put on her hat and coat and slipped her arm through his. Together they walked out towards the water. She took the wharf way home. A street lamp shone into the opaque river leaving an orange reflection. He thought of her polishing the brass plaques and how he fancied he had seen the fire of them, once, a long time ago in the harbour of New York. His secretary, Uta, had told him a story about her own soul flashing across the waters towards her. He had been surprised. That was not the sort of woman she seemed to be; so practical, so self-contained. Beautiful to a young man away from home. He had given her presents, clothes, perfume. And there was a night when …

  He pushed the memories aside. After he had left New York she had sent him a tie. Silk. Red with white spots. It had worn through with wearing it, he had worn it for so many years. He kept it though, in the drawer with his handkerchiefs. A piece of time worn through.

  Arm in arm, David and his mother, walking together as they used to walk when he waited for her to finish work and cook him kippers juggled down from their rack in the chimney. He could taste them, and his happiness, both warm in his mouth.

  ‘Where are you staying?’ she said.

  ‘With you?’

  They walked. Walked slowly past the rusted rings where the ships tethered. Walked by the packing depots empty as cathedrals. They walked by the pub with the pianola. Walked by the new gift shops selling candlesticks made out of salvaged railings. ‘People are not recyclable,’ he thought. ‘I should enjoy being melted down into something new.’ For the splinter of a second, his mind, luminous, reached forward. Then he checked himself as he always did. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. The night was dark.

  · · ·

  They went in. He felt a sense of relief and irresponsibility. This was his boyhood home. This was his mother’s house. His sea-boots were still in the cupboard, the exhausted rubber thin as skin. His pea-coat was behind the door. Nobody would come for him here.

  He found his blue roll-neck sweater, incongruous over the trousers of his suit, but he pulled it on anyway. His mother watched him as she mashed the potatoes.

  He ate with his elbows on the table. Eating with his fork in his right hand. She poured him a glass of Guinness.

  While she ate her own meal she silently answered her own question. ‘You would not have been any happier, David, if you had stayed here with the other men.’

  She told me that, later, almost in self-defence. I took her hand. If my father had not been haunted by an imagined past, he would have been haunted by an imagined future. Standing still, he would have envied movement. Moving, he longed to stand still. He was not a dissatisfied man. He was a man who could never quite learn the lines he had scripted for himself. Even at his most enthusiastic for a role, some part of him could not forget that it was a role. He did not know how to merge himself into one. A little less consciousness, or a little more, might have saved him. As it was he suffered.

  He was ashamed of suffering. Well-off people were not allowed to feel suffering. When they did, it became a kind of public hanging, exposed to the ‘Serve him right’ fascination of the crowd. He wondered, idly, if there should be some Government guidelines on how much a person could have in the bank and still be allowed to suffer.

  He was a self-made man. He was a blue-collar boy who could afford a tailor. He thought of himself as working class but other people found that absurd. The company he kept was well-off stock from well-off stock. They were the ones in positions of power. They were the ones who succeeded to control just as the aristocracy succeeded to title. The right homes, the right schools, the right connections, the right expectations. All of that was rewarded and when a man like him broke in through the window and took his place at the table, he had to be twice as good and still they made light of his achievements. Still would not quite believe that he was a street boy with a scholarship and more yearning than they knew was in the whole world. They acted as though it was just a fluke that more people like him weren’t in the same position as so many people like them. And sometimes they hinted he had had it easy. And sometimes, quite openly, they called him a thug. He had energy, no one could deny that, and a mission about him, that frankly, they found vulgar. They wanted to like him but he just wasn’t a likeable man. Too awkward, too angled, too arrogant, too proud. Odd that he got on so well with the workforce.

  He was lonely. None of his friends, his own kind, his own type, had done as well as he had. He had sailed away from that life and there was no passage of return. When he met people he had known, the downtrodden ones were overawed and the middle-class failures patronised him. He had been lucky of course. Of course. And now he was an island unto himself visited for goods and water.

  His wife was an alcoholic. His fault he knew. His children had been brought up with the right schools, the right connections, the right expectations. They hardly ever visited. And Alice, whom he loved, had turned out to be three times as good, and hated him, he thought, for what he had become.

  It was over now, suffering and striving. He had re-made his Will, leaving his wife their house and more than enough money. The rest, his shares, investments, capital, he had put into trust as scholarship money for poor children. One of them, maybe, would manage what he had not, and make sense of the contradictions.

  He washed his plate, kissed his mother, and went upstairs to the little room where he had slept. It was cold but he did not care. He lay in bed, listening to his mother stacking the pots and pans. His right side felt heavy and numb. His left side, lighter, freer. He usually held it rigid in fear of the twitch. It was a dog he had to muzzle.

  He slept and in his dreams he was steering the Godspeed again and his wife had given birth to his daughter and he had lit the river red with flares. Further back, and he was in New York taking his secretary on the ferry to Staten Island. He had held her hand, and later they had made love in a children’s animal park. Further back, and he was courting his own wife, black hair blue eyes and Irish green in the wit of her. Was that him, dashing, untidy, and full of promise? He had promised … he had lied.

  Trident Shipping. A young man with ruddy cheeks, never quite at ease on an office stool. A young man spending his summer evenings loa
ding the ships with his mates. Sam! Ted! He called them but they did not hear. David! His other self did not turn round. He tried to follow David home, but the man was not himself, it was a lad, eleven or twelve, in a smart uniform on his way to a fee-paying school. David waited for the lad all day long, and saw him at last, returning, dejected, confused, with a cut over his eye. The boy kissed his mother, threw his satchel into a corner and ran out to play. ‘Your uniform, David. Your uniform.’ Her voice was lost. The lad was in bed now, breathing steady, in, out, breathing through time.

  In the night David had a stroke. In the morning he was paralysed on his right side. He could not call out. He could not speak.

  I sat by my father’s bed, holding his hand, thinking him, feeling him, not knowing how else to communicate. He was not dead but he had no life. This was the room I had slept in on those years of party nights. I did not expect to see my father in the same narrow bed.

  ‘He won’t know you,’ said Grandmother. Would he not? His brain and his body were speaking different languages now and there was no interpreter between. If I talked to him would he understand?

  I began to tell him a story. A story of mirrors and handkerchiefs, of winter and New York. Of a man I had wanted to marry, of his wife whom I loved. Of spaghetti and numbers, paintings and the Algonquin Hotel. The Ship of Fools, and he and I on it.

  I should have preferred it to be neater, tauter, the pace of a mystery, the thrill of a romance. What I had were fragments of coloured glass held up to the light … This is my signal flashing towards you.

  It was a strange Confessional chamber. My father was as invisible and remote as a priest. What I could not have told him in life, I told him in this absence of life. I poured my brimming heart into the huge space of him. Tears pressed under his closed eyelids and filled the gutters of his cheeks. His tears, his fluid self. My father washed back into the river that had made him. The waters claiming him at last. Rheingeld. The gold in him unhardened as sun on the water. I thought we were hand in hand again, picking over the jetsam of the tide, able to speak, my father and I. To say what it was and to forgive.