The World and Other Places: Stories

‘Are you by any chance on the adventure of a lifetime?’ She nodded. She was small and dark with a face like a tax form. I tried to read the small print.

  ‘Do you know where we are going?’

  ‘No idea.’

  ‘Carry on then?’

  I started to think about Hansel and Gretel and how they found their way through the forest by leaving a trail of stones. We left nothing behind but the heat from our bodies and that soon chilled.

  The moon was full and white and mysterious as a Communion wafer. Would she guide us back? Forward? I no longer knew which way I wanted to go. Pursuit or retreat. In life, ordinary lifetime life, it is so easy to march down the road until your legs finally give way and everyone crowds round the coffin and declares you did your best. You didn’t though did you? The road was marked and you took it. Never mind that it was a ring road circling the heart.

  ‘What are you hoping for?’ I asked my companion.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Nothing at all?’

  ‘I don’t want to be disappointed.’

  We knocked at the door of the BIDE A WHILE guest house.

  No one answered. I tried to use the phone but its cable was loose like a shipwreck and its torn off dial lay in a pool of out-of-currency shillings. No one had been here since decimalisation.

  Been where? I have to say I don’t know. There are no signs and we brought no maps. We were awaiting instructions. You understand don’t you?

  We heard a noise behind the hotel. I braved myself and went to look. There a man and a woman sheltering under some dripping ivy. They said they had been there for some years and from the moss grown over their faces I believed them. I suggested we travel on together.

  ‘There’s nowhere to go,’ said the man.

  ‘There’s nowhere to stay,’ I said.

  He looked upset. ‘This is a hotel. There’s a phone box.’

  ‘Both out of service,’ I said.

  ‘Are you a tour operator?’ he asked me suspiciously.

  ‘I’m lost,’ I said. ‘That’s all.’

  It was night. It was winter. The snow began to fall. On the coach it had been September; warm, beginning-golden, a second flush of roses, apples on the trees. I must have mislaid October as I have mislaid so much of my life. October was gold and copper and brass and then November came and locked away the gold in lead chests. I always forget, when something is here, that it won’t always be here. Take it now or lose it. Risk everything.

  The sky was full of torn scraps of paper, all blank. There were no instructions on the snowflakes, or if there were they melted too quickly for us to read.

  Our little band went into the night and we told ourselves stories to keep warm. The stories were our fuel and food. Without them we were dead to each other and to ourselves. The usual stories were not relevant here. We had no photographs or anecdotes. Even our memories were uncertain. Testimony without corroboration is invention. There were no facts left. I looked in my suitcase; not a single one. Our bags that had been so heavy weighed nothing now. The world had seeped out of them.

  We came to a clearing. The snow was on the ground but not falling. Someone had built a fire that glowed and hissed because part of it was wet wood. We were cold but we hesitated. A man came out of a rough shelter, glanced at us, but said nothing. His interest was in the fire. He had left open the door, and we moved fearfully towards it, hoping for rest or a meal. There was room in the doorway for the four of us.

  Inside the hut was a baby and its mother. She held up the baby as though it were a star, five points at its legs and feet and head. The child was kicking and laughing, sparks snapping off its body and lighting up the room blue. It wore no clothing though its mother was dressed in black.

  The man returned, and walking through us, gestured to the woman. She and her infant followed him out of the hut and into the clearing where the fire burned and hissed.

  They took the child arm by arm, each by each, and held him in the flames, in the centre of the fire.

  Far from being blackened and burned, the child’s body hardened and cleared until we could see the drive of the blood through the arteries and the arteries like cobalt run through the transparent flesh. His heart was beating. He was not afraid.

  My companions went forward, dream-like, trance-like into the flames. I was not in a dream or a trance and I tried to run away. There was nowhere to run. The air itself was solid. The only movement left to me was forward.

  Forward towards the fire where the child held out its hand to me and I took it and let the fire catch round my trouserleg, my knees, my groin, and the child laughed and time burned round my head and I fell through the parting bars of the fire. Fell forty years through my mother’s belly and into the world of men.

  Psalms

  If you have ever tried to get a job as a tea-taster you will know as intimately as I do the nature of the preliminary questionnaire. It has all the usual things: height, weight, sex, hobbies new and old, curious personal defects, debilitating operations, over-long periods spent in the wrong countries. Fluency, currency, contacts, school tie. Fill it in, don’t blob the ink and if in doubt, be imaginative.

  Then, on the final page, before you sign your name in a hand that is firm enough to show spirit but not enough to show waywardness, there is a large empty space and a brief but meaningful demand: You are to write about the experience you consider to have been the most significant in the formation of your character. (You may interpret ‘character’ as ‘philosophy’ if such is your inclination.)

  This is very shocking because what we really want to talk about is the time we saw our sister compromised behind the tool shed, or the time we deliberately spat into the Communion wine.

  When I was small I had a tortoise called Psalms. It was bought for me and named for me by my mother in an effort to remind me to continually praise the Lord. My mother had a horror of graven images, including crucifixes, but she felt there could be no harm in a tortoise. It moved slowly, so I would be able to contemplate the wonder of creation in a way that would have been impossible with a ferret. It was not cuddly, so I wouldn’t be distracted, as I might with a dog, and it had very little visible personality, so there was no possibility of an intellectual bond, as there might have been with a parrot. All in all it seemed to her to be a very satisfactory pet. I had been agitating for a pet for some time. In my head I had a white rabbit called Ezra who bit people who ignored me. Ezra’s pelt was as white as the soul in heaven but his heart was black …

  My mother drew me a picture of a tortoise so that I would not be too disappointed or too ecstatic. She hated emotion. I hoped that they came in different colours, which was not unreasonable, since most animals do, and, when they were all clearly brown, I felt cheated.

  ‘You can paint their shells,’ said the pet shop man. ‘Some people paint scenes on them. One chap I know has twenty-six and if you line them up end to end in the right order you get the Flying Scotsman pulling into Edinburgh station.’

  I asked my mother if I could have another twelve so that I could do a tableau of the Last Supper, but she said it was too expensive and might be a sin against the Holy Ghost.

  ‘I don’t want the Lord and his disciples running around the garden on the backs of your tortoises. It isn’t respectful.’

  ‘But when sinners come into the garden they will think the Lord is sending them a vision.’ (I imagined the Heathen being confronted with more and more tortoises; how would they know I had thirteen? They would think it was a special God-sent tortoise that could multiply itself.)

  ‘No,’ said my mother firmly. ‘It would be Graven Images. If the Lord wanted to appear on the backs of tortoises, he would have done it by now.’

  ‘Well, can I have just two more then? I could do The Three Musketeers.’

  ‘Heathen child!’ My mother slapped me round the ears. ‘This pet is to help you think about our Saviour. How can you do that if you’ve got The Three Musketeers staring up at you?’

&
nbsp; The pet shop man looked sympathetic but he didn’t want to get involved. We packed up the one tortoise in a box with holes and went to catch the bus home. I was excited. Adam had named the animals, now I could name mine.

  ‘How about The Man in the Iron Mask?’ I suggested to my mother, who was reading her Band of Hope Review. She turned sharply and gave a little screech.

  ‘I’ve cricked my neck. What did you say?’

  I said it again. ‘We could call it Mim for short. It looks like a prisoner doesn’t it?’

  ‘You are not calling the animal The Man in the Iron Mask. You can call it Psalms.’

  ‘Why don’t I call it Ebenezer?’ (I was thinking that would match Ezra.)

  ‘We’re calling it Psalms because I want you to praise the Lord.’

  ‘I can praise the Lord if it’s called Ebenezer.’

  ‘You won’t though will you? What about the time I bought you a 3-D postcard of the Crucifixion and I caught you singing “There is nothing like a dame”?’

  ‘That’s South Pacific.’

  ‘Yes, and this is Psalms.’

  Psalms lived very quietly in a hutch at the bottom of the garden and every day I went and sat next to him and read him one of his namesakes out of the Bible. He was an attentive pet, never tried to run away or to dig up things. My mother spoke of his steadfastness with tears in her eyes. She felt convinced that Psalms was having a good effect on me. She enjoyed seeing us together. I never told her about Ezra the demon bunny, about his ears that filtered the sun on a warm day through a lattice of blood vessels like orchids. Ezra the avenger did not like Psalms and sometimes stole his lettuce.

  When my mother decided it was time for us to go on holiday she was determined to take Psalms with us.

  ‘I don’t want you to be distracted by Pleasure,’ she said, ‘not now that you are doing so well.’

  I was doing well. I knew huge chunks of the Bible by heart and won all the competitions in Sunday school. Most importantly, for an Evangelical, I was singing more, which you do, inevitably, if you are learning Psalms.

  We set off. On the train my mother supplied me with paper and pen and told me to form as many separate words as I could out of JERUSALEM. My father was dispatched for coffee and she read out loud interesting snippets from her new paperback, Portents of the Second Coming.

  I was not listening. Practice enabled me to pour out variations on JERUSALEM without thinking. Words slot into each other easily enough when sense ceases to be primary. Words become patterns and shapes. Tennyson, drunk on filthy sherry, said he knew the value of every word in the language, except possibly ‘scissors.’ By value he meant resonance, fluidity, not sense. So while my mother warned me of the forthcoming apocalypse I stared out of the window and imagined I was old enough to buy my own RailRover ticket and go off around the world with only a penknife and a knapsack and a white rabbit.

  A white rabbit? I jumped a little at this intrusion on my daydream. Ezra’s pink eyes were gleaming down at me from the frayed luggage rack. Ezra had not been invited on this trip. I had been determined to control him and make him stay behind. In the box next to me Psalms was fidgeting. My mother was oblivious.

  ‘When the Lord comes back,’ she said, ‘the lion will lie down with the lamb.’

  But will the rabbit make peace with the tortoise?

  Like Psalms I was feeling nervous, as one does when one’s fantasy life takes control. Ezra’s eyes bored into my soul and my own black heart. I felt transparent, the way I do now when I meet a radical feminist who can always tell that I shave my legs and have a penchant for silk stockings.

  ‘I’m trying to be good,’ I growled. ‘Go away.’

  ‘Yes,’ continued my mother, all unknowing, ‘we’ll live a natural life when the Lord comes back. There won’t be chemicals or deodorants or fornicating or electric guitars.’ She looked up sharply at my father. ‘Did you put saccharine in this coffee? You know I can’t drink it without.’

  My father smiled sheepishly and tried to placate her with a Bourbon biscuit, which was a mistake because she hated anything that sounded foreign. I remembered how it had been when my aunt had been to Italy and insisted on having us round to eat pasta. My mother kept turning it over and over with her fork and telling us how much she liked potatoes and carrots. She didn’t mind natives or people who lived in the jungle and other hot places because she felt it was not their fault. Europe, though, was close enough to Britain to behave properly and in not behaving properly was obviously perverse and due to be rolled up when the Lord came back. Besides, the Italians were Roman Catholics. In the Eternal City there will be no pasta.

  I tried to distract myself from her gathering storm by concentrating on the notices in our carriage. I took in the exhortation to leave the train clean and tidy and felt suitably awed by the dire warnings against pulling the Communication cord. Ezra began to chew it.

  At last, tired and emotional, though still believing that we shared a common ground other than the one we were standing on, we arrived at our boarding house.

  The following morning my mother suggested we take Psalms to the beach.

  ‘He’ll enjoy a change of air.’

  I hadn’t seen Ezra otherwise I might have been more alive to the possibilities of catastrophe. As it was, we made our way to a patch that wasn’t too windy, said a prayer, and my father fell asleep. Psalms seemed comforted by the sand beneath his feet and very slowly dug a very small hole.

  ‘Why don’t you carry him to that rock in the breakers?’ My mother pointed. ‘He won’t have seen the sea before.’ I nodded and picked him up, pretending to be Long John Silver making off with the booty.

  As we sat on the rock a group of boys came splashing through the waves. One of the boys held a bow and arrow. Before my eyes, he strung the bow, and fired at Psalms. It was a direct hit in the centre of the shell. This was of no matter because the arrow was rubber tipped and left no impression on the shell. It did make an impression on Psalms though, who became hysterical. He stood on his back legs, faltered for a moment, then toppled over into the sea.

  I lunged down to pick him out but I could not distinguish between rocks and tortoise. If only my mother had let me paint him as one of The Three Musketeers I could have snatched him from a watery grave.

  He was lost. Dead. Drowned. I thought of Shelley.

  ‘Psalms has been killed,’ I told my mother flatly.

  We spent all afternoon with a shrimping net trying to find his corpse. We did not succeed and by 6 p.m. my mother said she had to eat some fish and chips. It was a gloomy funeral supper and all I could see was Ezra the demon bunny hopping up and down on the sands. If it had not been for my father’s perseverance and devotion in whistling tunes from the War in a loud and lively manner we might never have recovered our spirits. As it was, my mother suddenly joined in with the words, patted me on the head, and said it must have been the Lord’s will. Psalms’s time was up, which was surely a sign that I should move on to another book of the Bible.

  ‘We could go straight on to Proverbs. What kind of a pet would be Proverbial?’

  ‘What about a snake?’

  ‘No,’ she shook her head, ‘snakes are wily not wise.’

  ‘What about an owl?’

  ‘Owls are too demanding. Besides, when your Uncle Bert parachuted into the canal by mistake, it was an owl I saw just before we got the telegram.’

  Death by water seemed to be a feature of our family so why not have something that was perpetually drowned?

  ‘Let’s get some fish, they are proverbial, and they will be quiet like Psalms, and they will remind us of the Flood and of our own mortality.’

  My mother was taken with this idea, especially since she had just eaten a fine piece of cod. She liked it when she could experience the Bible in different ways.

  As for me, I was confronted by my own black heart. You can bury what you like, but if it’s still alive when you bury it, don’t hope for a quiet life.

  I
s this what the tea board wants to know? Is it hoping to read of tortoises called Psalms?

  My mother bought some brown ink and sketched Psalms on a square of stiff card. She caught his expression very well, although I still feel the burden of being the only person who has seen what emotion a tortoise can express when about to drown. Such things are sobering and stretch down the years. I could have saved him but I felt he limited my life. Sometimes I take out the sketch and stare at his mournful face. He was always mournful but maybe that is a characteristic of the species because I never have seen a jubilant tortoise.

  On the other hand perhaps I never made him happy. Perhaps we were at emotional odds like Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler. Perhaps a briny end was better than a gradual neglect. I ponder these things in my heart.

  My mother, always philosophical in her own way, enjoyed a steady stream of biblical pets: the Proverbial fish, Ecclesiastes the hen, who never laid an egg where we could find it, Solomon the Scotch terrier, and finally, Isaiah and Jeremiah, a pair of goats who lived to a great age and died peacefully in their pen.

  ‘You can depend on the prophets,’ said my mother, when anyone marvelled at the longevity of the goats. The world was a looking glass for the Lord, she saw him in everything. Though I do warn her from time to time, never to judge a bunny by its pelt …

  JEANETTE WINTERSON

  Jeanette Winterson lives in London and the Cotswolds.

  Books by Jeanette Winterson

  Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

  The Passion

  Sexing the Cherry

  Written on the Body

  Art & Lies

  Art Objects (essays)

  Gut Symmetries

  The World and Other Places

  The PowerBook

  Lighthousekeeping