‘What’s that?’ Spike asked.
‘It’s what I told you about, today, yesterday, when, I don’t know when, it seems a lifetime ago. The Stone Gods.’
‘I wonder who left it there?’
‘It was me.’
‘Why, Billie?’
A message in a bottle. A signal. But then I saw it was still there … round and round on the Circle Line. A repeating world.
Is this how it ends?
It isn’t ended yet.
‘The book isn’t finished, but this is as far as I could go.’
‘What shall I do with it?’
‘Read it. Leave it for someone else to find. The pages are loose – it can be written again.’
In the cave, with Spike, watching the snow fall, watching the snow fall like Leonids, sparking and starting new worlds that last a second, return, re-form, begin again, I wondered if there is a place beyond this, where the dark dice didn’t play, where life itself became the winning number, not gambled away later by people like us who valued life so little that we lost it.
A human society that wasn’t just disgust.
Noises of whooping and drumming, celebrating the finding of the Egg, as tho’ one oaf with a stolen prize could change life and its lot. It will proceed as before: the fighting, the killing, the lack, the loss, for power, for envy, for every stupidity that man can devise.
And here, on my knees, is the little world I wanted to hold for ever, lightly, as the world itself is held in the sky lightly, without threats or fears, without supports of any kind, its own self, a garden of great beauty in a field of stars.
Holland, he said, pointing to a star nearest the moon, and I will clip my heart to him there, as a signal of my love. No flag, no territory, no fortress, no claim, but this love.
She did love me, for the forty weeks that I was her captive or she mine. We were each other’s conquered land. We were matched in power and helplessness. We were the barter and the prize, what we played for, what we lost. The dark dice, a two and a one, one became two, then two became two ones. A kingdom lost in a single throw. It’s risky, but it’s our only chance.
Come back one day. I’ll know it’s you. I can track you because we are the same stuff.
In the cave, last of the light, beginning of the long dark, I held Spike’s head while her eyes closed. I drew up my knees to give her the warmth from my body, pulled my coat around her against the cold.
Already the door is opening and he must go within. The timbered ceiling of the long hall is coffered with stars.
It was the last time we were together; her heart and mine. She did love me, love like a star, light years gone.
‘Where are you going, Billie?’
If I could tell you that I could tell you everything – everything about me. There are two questions: where have you come from, and where are you going? But the brain doesn’t have separate regions for past and future; only the present is differentiated by the brain.
We split time into three parts. The brain, it seems, splits it twice only: now, and not now.
So in the not-now, I can say that I was set adrift in an open boat, and after a while learned how to make a rudder and oars, though I never mastered a sail and its wind. The wind blows where it will, and I have many times arrived at the unexpected.
But I never found a place to land.
I put the pages on the desk, picked up Spike and kissed her lightly on the mouth. Then I put her on top of the pages.
‘See you in sixty-five million years, maybe.’
‘Billie?’
‘Spike?’
‘I’ll miss you.’
‘That’s limbic.’
‘I can’t help it.’
‘That’s limbic too.’
I set off, away from the telescope, down through the valley and across the plain of the night. I had no direction or real purpose: I wanted to walk until my mind was still. Far off, I could hear the noise of guns and shouting. I would go back when I could, but not now.
A quantum universe – neither random nor determined. A universe of potentialities, waiting for an intervention to affect the outcome.
Love is an intervention.
Why do we not choose it?
I didn’t notice the soldiers coming towards me. Two humans dressed as androids, no faces, no soft skin, combat gear, helmets, guns. One of them shouted something from behind his black visor. I couldn’t hear, I shook my head. We stood still, the three of us. They didn’t come towards me. I smiled, turned, walked on. There was another shout. I walked on. Then I heard three reports in quick succession, and I fell down. There was blood, a lot of blood, a surprising amount of blood, was what I thought – so much blood that they had to burn the sheet. No, that was a long time ago.
The moon is full. There’s a star just by. That’s what I can see from where I am. Then, for a while, I have to close my eyes.
When I open my eyes again, I’m at the bottom of the track. My body is lying at an angle. My clothes are muddy. I know I’m bleeding but the wound was always there.
I look down at my body, small and familiar, and I feel affection, and some regret, because I can’t go back there again.
I set off up the track, and it’s very dark here under the trees, but the gunfire noise has stopped, and I can hear birds, which is strange because it is so dark.
On my left is the broad, active stream with watercress growing in the fast part, and flag iris on the bank, and a willow bending over the water, and a foam of frog spawn, and a moorhen sailing the current.
I know this track, this stream, I’ve been here before, many times it seems, though I can’t say when. The track rises steeply, and I must quicken my pace. Looking back, it’s very dark.
Ahead of me, light is breaking through the canopy of the trees, and it is sunlight and daylight, and I push towards it, higher now, as the bank falls away, and the stream far below gains in strength, ready to fall over the clough.
I feel strong and easy. The climb is nothing. I can feel energy like sap in my body. There is nothing to fear.
At the bend in the track, I see what I know I will see: the compact seventeenth-century house, built on the sheer fall of the drop to the stream. There’s a water-barrel by the front door, and a tin cup hung on a chain, and an apple tree at the beginning of the garden, where it meets the track.
The stone slates are mossy and green. The fire is burning inside.
I have to open the gate between the house and the track, and as I look back I can see where I have come and how the light pulls away and then disappears.
I have my hand on the gate, but I hesitate for a minute because when I go through I can’t come back.
There’s a noise – the door of the house opens. It’s you, coming out of the house, coming towards me, smiling, pleased. It’s you, and it’s me, and I knew it would end like this, and that you would be there, had always been there; it was just a matter of time.
Across the gate, your face. You can’t come any further. I have to go through. The latch is light. Yes, open it. It was not difficult.
Everything is imprinted for ever with what it once was.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Philippa Brewster, Lysander Ashton, Dr Teresa Anderson at Jodrell Bank, Diana Souhami, Simon Prosser and his team at Penguin Books, and my agent, Caroline Michel.
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First published by Hamish Hamilton 2007
Published in Penguin Books 2008
Copyright © Jeanette Winterson, 2007
The moral right of the author has been asserted
All rights reserved
ISBN: 978-0-141-92357-4
Jeanette Winterson, The Stone Gods
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