Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

  Now and again, if she was in a sociable frame of mind and there was a knock at the door, she left the poker alone and sent me out the back door to run up the alley and peer round the corner down the street to see who was there. I ran back with the news and then she decided whether or not they could come in – this usually meant a lot of work with the fly-spray air freshener while I went to open the door. By now, discouraged by no response, the visitor would be halfway down the street so I had to run and fetch them back, and then my mother would pretend to be surprised and pleased.

  I didn't care; it gave me a chance to go upstairs and read a forbidden book.

  I think Mrs Winterson had been well read at one time. When I was about seven she read Jane Eyre to me. This was deemed suitable because it has a minister in it – St John Rivers – who is keen on missionary work.

  Mrs Winterson read out loud, turning the pages. There is the terrible fire at Thornfield Hall and Mr Rochester goes blind, but in the version Mrs Winterson read, Jane doesn't bother about her now sightless paramour; she marries St John Rivers and they go off together to work in the mission field. It was only when I finally read Jane Eyre for myself that I found out what my mother had done.

  And she did it so well, turning the pages and inventing the text extempore in the style of Charlotte Brontë.

  The book disappeared as I got older – perhaps she didn't want me to read it for myself.

  I assumed that she hid books the way she hid everything else, including her heart, but our house was small and I searched it. Were we endlessly ransacking the house, the two of us, looking for evidence of each other? I think we were – she, because I was fatally unknown to her, and she was afraid of me. Me, because I had no idea what was missing but felt the missing-ness of the missing.

  We circled each other, wary, abandoned, full of longing. We came close but not close enough and then we pushed each other away forever.

  I did find a book, but I wish I hadn't; it was hidden in the tallboy under a pile of flannels, and it was a 1950s sex manual called How to Please Your Husband.

  This terrifying tome might have explained why Mrs Winterson didn't have children. It had black-and-white diagrams and lists and tips and most of the positions looked like adverts for a children's game of physical torment called Twister.

  As I pondered the horrors of heterosexuality I realised that I need not feel sorry for either of my parents; my mother hadn't read it – perhaps she had opened it once, realised the extent of the task, and put it away. The book was flat, pristine, intact. So whatever my father had had to do without, and I really don't think they ever had sex, he hadn't had to spend his nights with Mrs W with one hand on his penis and the other holding the manual while she followed the instructions.

  I remember her telling me that soon after they were married my father had come home drunk and she had locked him out of the bedroom. He had broken down the door and she had thrown her wedding ring out of the window and into the gutter. He went to find it. She got the night bus to Blackburn. This was offered as an illustration of how Jesus improves a marriage.

  The only sex education my mother ever gave me was the injunction: ‘Never let a boy touch you down there’. I had no idea what she meant. She seemed to be referring to my knees.

  Would it have been better if I had fallen for a boy and not a girl? Probably not. I had entered her own fearful place – the terror of the body, the irresolution of her marriage, her own mother's humiliation at her father's coarseness and womanising. Sex disgusted her. And now, when she saw me, she saw sex.

  I had made my promises. And in any case Helen had gone away. But now I was someone who wanted to be naked with someone else. I was someone who had loved the feel of skin, of sweat, of kissing, of coming. I wanted sex and I wanted closeness.

  Inevitably there would be another lover. She knew that. She was watching me. Inevitably she forced it to happen.

  I had finished my O levels and done pretty badly. I failed four, got five, and my school had closed down, or rather it had become a comprehensive school without a sixth form. That was part of the Labour government's education policy. I was able to go on to a techanical college to take my A levels, and with some grumbling Mrs Winterson had agreed, providing I worked on the markets in the evenings and on Saturday to bring some money into the house.

  I was glad to get out of the school and make a fresh start. Nobody thought I would come to much. The burning place inside me seemed like anger and trouble to them. They didn't know how many books I had read or what I was writing up in the hills on long days alone. On the top of the hill looking out over the town I wanted to see further than anybody had seen. That wasn't arrogance; it was desire. I was all desire, desire for life.

  And I was lonely.

  Mrs Winterson had succeeded there; her own loneliness, impossible to breach, had begun to wall us all in.

  It was summer and it was time for the annual holiday in Blackpool.

  This holiday consisted of a coach ride to the famous seaside town and a week in a backstreet boarding house – we couldn't afford a sea view. My mother sat in a deckchair most of the day reading sensationalist literature about Hell, and my father walked about. He loved walking.

  In the evenings we all went gambling on the slot machines. This was not deemed to be gambling proper. If we won, we got fish and chips.

  When I was a child I was happy with all of this and I think they were happy too, in that brief, carefree, once-a-year one-week holiday. But our lives had got darker. Since the exorcism the year before we had all been ill.

  My mother started staying in bed all day for days on end, making my dad sleep downstairs because she said she was vomiting.

  Then she had manic sessions when she stayed up all day and all night, knitting, baking, listening to the radio. Dad went to work – he had no choice – but he stopped making things. He used to make clay animals and fire them in the kiln at work. Now he hardly spoke. No one spoke. And it was time to go on holiday.

  My periods had stopped. I had had glandular fever and I was exhausted. I liked being at the technical college and working the markets, but I was sleeping ten hours a night every night, and it was the first time, but not the last, that I could hear voices, quite clearly, that were not inside my head. That is, they presented themselves as outside my head.

  I asked to stay at home.

  My mother said nothing.

  On the morning of departure my mother packed the two suitcases, one for my dad and one for herself, and they left the house. I walked down the street with them to the coach station. I asked for the house key.

  She said she couldn't trust me in the house on my own. I could stay with the pastor. It had been arranged.

  ‘You didn't tell me.’

  ‘I'm telling you now.’

  The coach pulled in. People started getting on.

  ‘Give me the key. I live there.’

  ‘We'll be back next Saturday.’

  ‘Dad . . .’

  ‘You heard what Connie said . . .’

  They got on the coach.

  I had been seeing a girl who was still at the school – I have a late August birthday so I was always the youngest in my year. This girl Janey had an October birthday so she was one of the oldest – we were a year apart academically but only a couple of months in age. She was coming to the college in the autumn. I liked her a lot, but I was too scared to kiss her. She was popular with the boys and had a boyfriend. But it was me she wanted to see.

  I went round to her house and told her what had happened and her mother, who was a decent woman, let me sleep in their caravan parked outside the house.

  I was filled with rage. We went for a walk and I pulled a farm gate off its hinges and threw it into the river. Janey put her arm round me. ‘Let's go and break in. It's your house.’

  So that night we climbed over the back wall and into the yard. My dad kept a few tools in a little shed and I found a jemmy bar and a claw hammer and prised open the kitch
en door.

  We were in.

  We were like kids. We were kids. We heated up a Fray Bentos steak pie – they used to be sold in flat saucer-shaped tins – and we opened some canned peas. There was a canning factory in our town and tins of food were cheap.

  We drank some of the bottled stuff everybody loved called sarsparilla – it tasted like liquorice and treacle and it was black and fizzy and sold in unlabelled bottles from a market stall. I always bought it when I had the money, and I bought it for Mrs Winterson too.

  The house was looking nice. Mrs Winterson had been decorating. She was expert at measuring and putting up wallpaper. My dad's job was to mix the paste, cut the lengths of wallpaper to her directions, then pass the sheets up the ladder so that she could drop and hang them and dust out the air bubbles with her big brush.

  Naturally, the operation had her signature-style on it. As a compulsive-obsessive it had to be done until it was done.

  I came home. She was up the ladder singing ‘Will Your Anchor Hold in the Storms of Life’.

  My dad wanted his tea because he had to go to work, but that was all right because it was ready and in the oven.

  ‘Are you coming down, Connie?’

  ‘Not till I'm done.’

  My dad and me sat in the living room eating our mince and potatoes in silence. Above us was the whisk whisk of the wallpaper brush.

  ‘Do you not want something to eat, Connie?’

  ‘Don't mind me. I'll just have a sandwich up the ladder.’

  So the sandwich had to be made and brought to her and passed up like feeding a dangerous animal in a safari park. She sat there, with her scarf on to keep bits out of her perm, her head just at ceiling height, eating her sandwich and looking down at us.

  Dad went off to work. The ladder moved round the room a bit but she was still up it. I went off to bed and when I got up for college the next morning, there she was, with a cup of tea, up the ladder.

  Had she been there all night? Had she got back up when she heard me coming down?

  But the living room was decorated.

  Janey and I were both dark-eyed intense types though she laughed more than I did. Her dad had a good job but there was a worry that he would lose it. Her mother worked and there were four children. She was the eldest. If her dad did lose his job she would have to give up college and start work.

  Everybody we knew used cash and when you had no cash you had no money. Borrowing money was seen as the road to ruin. When my father died in 2008 he had never had a credit or debit card. He had a building society account for savings only.

  Janey knew that her dad had a loan and that a man came round for the money every Friday. She was frightened of the man.

  I told her not to be frightened. I said there would be a time when we would never be frightened again.

  We held hands. I was wondering what it would be like to have a home of your own where you could come and go, where people would be welcome, where you would never be frightened again . . .

  We heard the front door open. There were dogs barking. The door into the living room was shoved open. Two Dobermanns ran in growling and pawing and backing up. Janey screamed.

  Behind the Dobermanns was my mother's brother – Uncle Alec.

  Mrs Winterson had decided that I would come back to the house. She knew I would climb over the back wall. She had paid a neighbour to telephone her at the boarding house in Blackpool. The neighbour had spotted me, gone round to the phone box, phoned Blackpool, and spoken to my mother. My mother telephoned her brother.

  She loathed him. There was nothing between them but loathing. He had inherited the motor business from their father, and she had been left with nothing. All the nursing of her mother, all the years of looking after Grandad, cooking his meals, washing his clothes, had left her with nothing but a miserable house and no money. Her brother had a thriving garage and petrol station.

  He told me to get out. I said I wouldn't go. He said I'd go if he had to set the dogs on me. He meant it. He told me I was ungrateful.

  ‘I said to Connie don't go adopting. You don't know what you get.’

  ‘Drop dead.’

  ‘You what?’

  ‘Drop dead.’

  Slam. Straight across the face. Janey was really crying now. I had a split lip. Uncle Alec was flushed, furious.

  ‘I'll give you five minutes and I'll be back in here and you'll wish you'd never been born.’

  But I have never wished that and I wasn't going to start wishing it for him.

  He went out and I heard him get in his car and start the engine. I could hear it running. I ran upstairs and got some clothes, then I went into the War Cupboard and pulled out a load of tinned food. Janey put it all in her bag.

  We went back out over the wall so that he wouldn't see us. Let him storm in again after his five minutes were up and shout at nothing.

  I felt cold inside. I felt nothing inside. I could have killed him. I would have killed him. I would have killed him and felt nothing.

  *

  At Janey's her parents had gone out and her grandma was babysitting. The boys had gone to bed. I was sitting on the floor of the caravan. Janey came and put her arms round me, then she kissed me, really kissed me.

  I was crying then, and kissing her, and we got undressed and into the little caravan bed, and I remembered, my body remembered, what it was like to be in one place and to be able to be there – not watchful, not worried, not with your head somewhere else.

  Did we fall asleep? We must have done. There were the car headlights sweeping across the caravan. Her parents were coming home. I felt my heart beating too fast, but the lights were not a warning. We were safe. We were together.

  She had beautiful breasts. She was all beautiful, with a rich thick triangle of black hair at the fork of her legs, and dark hair on her arms and in a line from her belly to her pubic hair.

  In the morning when we woke early she said, ‘I love you. I've loved you for ages.’

  ‘I was too scared,’ I said.

  ‘Don't be,’ she said. ‘Not any more.’

  And her clearness was like water, cool and deep and see-through right to the bottom. No guilt. No fear.

  She told her mother about us, and her mother warned her not to tell her father, or to let him find out.

  We took our bicycles. We went twenty miles and made love under a hedge. Janey's hand was covered in blood. My periods had started again.

  The next day we cycled to Blackpool. I went to my mother and asked her why she had done it. Why had she locked me out? Why didn't she trust me? I didn't ask her why she no longer loved me. Love was not a word that could be used between us any more. It was not a simple do you?/don't you? Love was not an emotion; it was the bomb site between us.

  She looked at Janey. She looked at me. She said, ‘You're no daughter of mine.’

  It hardly mattered. It was too late for lines like that now. I had a language of my own and it wasn't hers.

  Janey and I were happy. We went to college. We saw each other every day. I had started driving lessons in a beat-up Mini on a piece of spare land. I was living in my own world of books and love. The world was vivid and untouched. I felt free again – I think because I was loved. I took Mrs Winterson some flowers.

  When I got back that night, the flowers were in a vase on the table. I looked at them . . . The stalks of the flowers were in the vase. She had cut off the heads and thrown them on the unlit fire. The fire was ready-laid, and on the neat black layer of coal were the white heads of the little carnations.

  My mother was sitting silently in the chair. I said nothing. I looked at the room, small and spruce, at the brass flying ducks over the mantelpiece, at the brass crocodile nutcracker next to the mantel clock, at the clothes rack that we could raise and lower over the fire, at the sideboard with our photographs on it. This is where I lived.

  She said, ‘It's no good. I know what you are.’

  ‘I don't think you do.’

&
nbsp; ‘Touching her. Kissing her. Naked. In bed together. Do you think I don't know what you're doing?’

  All right . . . this was it . . . no hiding this time. No second self. No secrets.

  ‘Mum . . . I love Janey.’

  ‘So you're all over her . . . hot bodies, hands everywhere . . .’

  ‘I love her.’

  ‘I gave you a chance. You're back with the Devil. So I tell you now, either you get out of this house and you don't come back or you stop seeing that girl. I'm going to tell her mother.’

  ‘She knows.’

  ‘She what?’

  ‘Her mother knows. She's not like you.’

  Mrs Winterson was quiet for a long time and then she started to cry. ‘It's a sin. You'll be in Hell. Soft bodies all the way to Hell.’

  I went upstairs and started packing my things. I had no idea what I was going to do.

  When I came down my mother was sitting stock-still staring into space.

  ‘I'll go then . . .’ I said.

  She didn't answer. I left the room. I walked down the dark narrow lobby, the coats on their pegs. Nothing to say. I was at the front door. I heard her behind me. I turned.

  ‘Jeanette, will you tell me why?’

  ‘What why?’

  ‘You know what why . . .’

  But I don't know what why . . . what I am . . . why I don't please her. What she wants. Why I am not what she wants. What I want or why. But there is something I know: ‘When I am with her I am happy. Just happy.’

  She nodded. She seemed to understand and I thought, really, for that second, that she would change her mind, that we would talk, that we would be on the same side of the glass wall. I waited.

  She said, ‘Why be happy when you could be normal?’

  9

  English Literature A – Z

  T

  HE ACCRINGTON PUBLIC LIBRARY HAD a copy of most things. It had a copy of Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1932).