Sexing the Cherry

  And yet rotting is a common experience. We all shall, even myself, though I imagine it will take a worm of some endeavour to make any impression.

  Firebrace and Scroggs are dead. The sisters at the Spitalfields brothel made a great profit that night, when word was passed round that there were freshly dismembered bodies to be had. The brothel is gone now, my friend dead from disease and the other sisters vanished the way women do.

  I miss Tradescant. He left me a viper in a bottle before he died, to remind me of happier times when we waged war on all vipers. I wish he could see this mess on ropes, it would gladden him to think there is still justice in the world.

  My neighbour the witch is not dead. She is much shrunken, even more than she was when Jordan was found. She is about the height of a beagle, with great eyes and ears to match. Her house was lost over the. years, in one skirmish or another, but I have lent her a dog kennel till the end of her days. She has done nothing to deserve my charity, but it is my undoing and my cross to bear. She still claims to predict the future and is often to be found brooding over my watercress bed, observing the shifting pattern of the teeth.

  When Tradescant died, Jordan took over the expeditions and charted the courses and decided what was precious and what was not. He's been at sea for thirteen years, though Fve had gifts from him and I've always known that he would come back...

  At sunset, on the day of the gibbet, soldiers of the new King, our own Charles the Second, came and took down the bodies and threw them in the common pit beneath the gallows, a stinking place already full of rank and sweating corpses. The heads of the three were chopped off and mounted on the top of Westminster Abbey, a piece of theatre that greatly improved the tempers of all going to and fro.

  As for the rest of the forty-nine who had signed the King's death warrant, forty-one were still alive in 1660 when the new King returned. I have always thought us too civilized a nation, though I have a soft heart myself, and I was sorry to see that only nine of those forty-one received the proper penalty under the law for their unanimous murder.

  These nine, close associates of Cromwell, were half hanged, then disembowelled and quartered while still alive. If they showed signs of fainting from their ordeal they were thoroughly roused with vinegar and oil of cloves or occasionally a bucket of rancid water. I had been hoping to catch a bit of bowel or any innard as a souvenir for Jordan, but when I darted forward with my bag I was told that all remains were the property of the Crown. If Tradescant had been alive he would have intervened. As it was I made do with seeing and remembering, and at night-time I was fortunate enough to find a gall bladder complete with several stones. I have it by the viper next to my bed.

  Whilst Jordan was away I discovered from my time in the brothel that men's members, if bitten off or otherwise severed, do not grow again. This seems a great mistake on the part of nature, since men are so careless with their members and will put them anywhere without thinking. I believe they would force them in a hole in the wall if no better could be found.

  I did mate with a man, but cannot say that I felt anything at all, though I had him jammed up to the hilt. As for him, spread on top of me with his face buried beneath my breasts, he complained that he could not find the sides of my cunt and felt like a tadpole in a pot. He was an educated man and urged me to try and squeeze in my muscles, and so perhaps bring me closer to his prong. I took a great breath and squeezed with all my might and heard something like a rush of air through a tunnel, and when I strained up on my elbows and looked down I saw I had pulled him in, balls and everything. He was stuck. I had the presence of mind to ring the bell and my friend came in with her sisters, and with the aid of a crowbar they prised him out and refreshed him with mulled wine while I sang him a little song about the fortitude of spawning salmon. He was a gallant gentleman and offered a different way of pleasuring me, since I was the first woman he said he had failed. Accordingly, he burrowed down the way ferrets do and tried to take me in his mouth. I was very comfortable about this, having nothing to be bitten off. But in a moment he thrust up his head and eyed me wearily.

  'Madam,' he said, 'I am sorry, I beg your parden but I cannot.'

  'Cannot?'

  'Cannot. I cannot take that orange in my mouth. It will not fit. Neither can I run my tongue over it. You are too big, madam.'

  I did not know what part of me he was describing, but I felt pity for him and offered him more wine and some pleasant chat.

  When he had gone I squatted backwards on a pillow and parted my bush of hair to see what it was that had confounded him so. It seemed all in proportion to me. These gentlemen are very timid.

  When I was a girl I heard my mother and father copulating. I heard my father's steady grunts and my mother's silence. Later my mother told me that men take pleasure and women give it. She told me in a matter-of-fact way, in the same tone of voice she used to tell me how to feed the dogs or make bread.

  When I was born I was tiny enough to sleep in my father's shoe; it was only later that I began to grow, and to grow to such proportions that my father had the idea of exhibiting me. My mother refused him, saying that no member of her family should be the subject of an exhibition, no matter how poor we became. One night my father tried to steal me and sell me to a man with one leg. They had a barrel ready to put me in, but no sooner had they slammed on the lid than I burst the bonds of the barrel and came flying out at my father's throat.

  This was my first murder.

  I have forgotten my childhood, not just because of my father but because it was a bleak and unnecessary time, full of longing and lost hope. I can remember some incidents, but the sense of time passing escapes me. If I were to stretch out all that seemed to happen, and relive it, it might take a day or two. Where then are all the years in between?

  When I got news of Jordan's return I knew he would be returning as a hero and that I had to meet him as a hero's mother. I spared no expense and had a new dress made of the finest wool with a beautiful shawl cut out of the altar cloth of Stepney church. I made the journey to Hove in a carriage and set up my encampment on the beach, waiting for the first sign of Jordan's sail. When he left me he was nineteen, with crow-black hair and a quiet voice. He was thirty-three now, and I could not picture him.

  There were the usual villains on the sands, hoping to rob a poor woman in her sleep, but I pushed them under-water and left them bloated with salt. In my spare time I collected shells.

  At last, on the third day, I saw a speck at sea. It grew bigger as the hours passed and by evening I could see it in full sail anchoring. I put my hands to my mouth and shouted Jordan's name, not being able to tell if he could hear me above the screaming of the gulls dropping for fish.

  I lit my fire and waited. In the darkness Jordan let down a small boat and put a lantern in the prow. He rowed towards me so softly that it wasn't until I heard him jump out knee-deep in the water that I looked up and ran to help him pull up the boat.

  His beard was grey in parts. He smiled at me and took a wash-leather bag from his pocket. There was a rope of pearls inside. I put them on and they glinted in the firelight. He had a pan with him, and some food, and still without speaking we sat opposite one another over the fire, the black sails of the ship visible in the moonlight, his boat dark on the sands.

  I wanted to tell him things, to tell him I loved him and how much I'd missed him,- but thirteen years of words were fighting in my throat and I couldn't get any of them out. There was too much to say so I said nothing.

  We ate our food and I sat with my knees drawn up, my back against a rock, while he lay on his side, his legs out, his body propped on one elbow. He was watching the waves.

  When he fell asleep I crept across to cover him up with my blankets and I looked at the length of him, his thin wrists and nose like a sharp slope. I stroked his hair and I realized his face was scarred. No one would hurt him now. As I pulled the cover up to his chin I noticed something glinting round his neck. Gently, so as not to wake him, I
untangled it from his clothing and saw it to be a silver pendant. I had not given it to him. It was not his medallion. It was a tiny pair of shoes, dancing shoes, their feet curved inwards as though standing on tip-toe. He turned suddenly and grunted, and as I let go of the chain he took it in one hand rather as a child will hold its mother's thumb.

  I lifted his head and put my shawl beneath it, and sat all night at his feet, counting the hours by the tide.

  1990

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  PAINTINGS 3: 'Mr Rose, the Royal Gardener, presents the pineapple to Charles the Second'. The artist is unknown, probably Dutch. Mr Rose in his wig is down on one knee and the King in his wig is accepting the pineapple. Colours of fruit and flowers make up the painting.

  Soon after I saw this painting I decided to join the Navy. My father was pleased, my mother was worried. I was straight out of school and eager for a career. Any career that would take me away.

  Three things coincided.

  I saw the painting and tried to imagine what it would be like to bring something home for the first time. I tried to look at a pineapple and pretend I'd never seen one before. I couldn't do it. There's so little wonder left in the world because we've seen everything one way or another. Where had that pineapple come from? Barbados was easy to find out, but who had brought it, and under what circumstances, and why?

  I bought a pineapple and kept it in my room until it went rotten. My mother kept coming in and putting her nose to the air like a Pointer.

  She said, 'I can smell something, you know.'

  Later she said, 'I can smell something sweet.'

  Then, There's something rotting in here.'

  She found it under the bed and threw it away. It was pulpy inside, and the skin had shrivelled into scaly geometric shapes.

  Before she found it-and I kept it a long time, thanks to the common methods of injecting preservative into whatever's alive -1 used to take it out at night and feel its sprouting head and rough body. If I thought she wouldn't come in early in the morning I chanced sleeping with it, though on those days she complained I smelled of fruit.

  'How can the boy smell of fruit?' said my father. 'He hasn't been near any fruit.'

  I dropped my head and finished my porridge obediently. My mother has often been labelled as strange but that's because she says things people can't possibly believe. Mostly she's right.

  I said to my friend Jack, 'Jack, don't you wish we could still be pirates or something?'

  He said, 'Don't be stupid, Nicolas, all that water and no soap.'

  He's very clean, Jack.

  Nicolas Jordan. Five foot ten. Dark. Makes model boats and sails them at the weekend. Best friend Jack. No brothers or sisters. Parents can't afford a telescope. Has a book instead on how to navigate by the stars, and a pair of binoculars on a khaki strap. That's all there is to say about me. On the outside, anyway.

  The second of the three things was The Observer's Book of Ships.

  I bought it in a second-hand shop. The frontispiece said:

  By

  FRANK E. DODMAN

  foreworded by

  A. C. Hardy BSc, MINA, FRGS

  For a long time I had a secret lover called Mina Frogs. When I came home a hero she was always waiting at the docks and desperate to marry me. I loved that book, describing over a hundred types of ships with ninety-five line drawings, sixteen colour plates and sixteen pages of photographs.

  I built my own model ship from the pictures. At first I had kits with balsa wood rigging and plastic seamen, but soon I learned to design my own with tools from my father's workshop. I never bothered with a crew. The crew weren't beautiful, they were just slaves of the ship.

  At weekends my mother cooked and my father read the paper. I went to the pond and sailed my boats. I liked the uncertainty of the wind. Jack came with me, bringing his books on computer science and his father's copies of GP, a magazine for doctors. The magazines were full of pictures of incurables, and that included anyone suffering from the common cold.

  'It has to go away of its own accord,' said Jack. 'All those little pills are just money-makers.'

  'Like love,' I said, setting the rudder. 'There's no cure for love.'

  'Who are you in love with?' said Jack.

  'No one. She doesn't exist.'

  'It's the most unhygienic thing you can do,' said Jack.

  'It can't be. What about people who work in sewers?'

  'They wear protective clothing. People in love hardly ever wear clothes - look at the magazines.'

  He meant Playboy and Penthouse. His father took those too.

  I ignored him then and let him get back to his books. He loved computers, so clean, so programmable. When I told him I had learned to steer by the stars, he said, 'What for?'

  He isn't insensitive, he's just modern.

  One afternoon, when Jack was lying on his side reading about how some kids had broken into the computer at the Pentagon, a man came over to me and rested on his heels by my boat.

  'You made it yourself?'

  'Yes.'

  'What kit?'

  'No kit. I made it, that's all.'

  'Can she sail?'

  'Oh yes. I've balanced her perfectly. She's ready for any wind.'

  'I used to make them,' said the man, 'and sail in them too. I've been everywhere, but I still have a feeling I've missed it. I feel like I'm being laughed at, I don't know what by, who by, it sounds silly. I think I may have missed the world, that the one I've seen is a decoy to get me off the scent. I feel as though I'm always on the brink of making sense of it and then I lose it again.'

  He stood up; he didn't look at me. Then he walked away.

  I picked up my boat and went over to Jack.

  'Who was that?' he said.

  'I don't know. A sailor or someone.'

  'He must be a nut.'

  'Why?'

  'Nobody wears clothes like that any more.'

  'Come on Jack, I'm hungry.'

  And the third thing?

  I was cleaning out my bedroom. We were decorating the house. Under the bed were stacks of books I'd read when I was younger. I put most of them in a box, not even glancing at them. There was one I remembered, remembered so vividly that it came to me not as a thought but as a taste in the mouth. It was rainy when I was reading it, rainy and soon after Christmas. It was called The Boys'Book of Heroes, and on the front there were ships and aeroplanes and horses and men with steel jaws. I opened it and some pages fell out in my own childish handwriting. I suppose I had been ten at the time. It was my precis of heroes. The ones I liked. I'd drawn pictures of them in the margin.

  William the Conqueror

  Born 1028. Known as 'William the Bastard'. Three of his guardians died violent deaths and his tutor was murdered. 'William was an out-of-doors man, a hunter, a soldier, fierce and despotic. Uneducated. He had few graces...'

  He married Matilda, daughter of Baldwin the Fifth of Flanders. The Pope condemned the marriage and they were forced to build a monastery each as a penance.

  As the cousin of the childless Edward the Confessor, William the Bastard had expected to inherit England by right. When Harold got it instead he invaded.

  Christopher Columbus

  Otherwise known to his Spanish friends as Christobel Colon. He was born in Genoa, the son of a weaver, and he started his seafaring career as a pirate.

  He discovered America by prophecy rather than astronomy, writing to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain in 1502 that 'neither reason nor mathematics nor maps were of any use to me*. He later wrote his own Book of Prophecies and died in obscurity.

  Francis Drake

  Born in 1540 in Devon, he went to sea at thirteen, and when he was thirty-seven he set off in the Golden Hind to sail round the world. He was later made Mayor of Plymouth.

  Notable for his defeat of the Armada, he was also Queen Elizabeth's favourite looter and was nicknamed 'the master-thief of the Unknown World'.

>   The most popular hero for the following 200 years, he was 'short of stature, of strong limb, round headed, brown hair, full bearded, his eyes round and large and clear'.

  Lord Nekon

  Born in 1758, Nelson went to sea at nine and had been to the Arctic by the time he was fifteen. On another voyage he contracted malaria and had a vision. '"Well, then," I exclaimed, "I will be a hero.'"

  When Wellington met Nelson he said his talk was 'all about himself and in really a style so vain and silly as to surprise and almost disgust me'. None the less, Nelson took possession of the flagship Victory and set off to defeat Napoleon. He outlined his self-confessedly brilliant plan of attack, calling it 'the Nelson Touch'.

  He was killed in the historic battle but before he died he had signed a document bequeathing his mistress, Emma, Lady Hamilton, and their child, Horatia, to the nation. The nation took no notice and lauded the dead Admiral while Emma died in Calais nine years later, raddled with disease and quite alone.

  If you're a hero you can be an idiot, behave badly, ruin your personal life, have any number of mistresses and talk about yourself all the time, and nobody minds. Heroes are immune. They have wide shoulders and plenty of hair and wherever they go a crowd gathers. Mostly they enjoy the company of other men, although attractive women are part of their reward.

  My father watches war films. War films are full of men in tin hats talking in terse sentences. They play cards round folding tables and lean over to each other from their bunk beds. They jump out of trenches and mow with their machine guns in 180° arcs. They have girlfriends but they prefer each other.

  My father watches submarine films. The siren goes and the men in T-shirts get thrown against the wall. The commander glues himself to the periscope and we get a clip of the submarine going down like a steel whale.

  My father watches ocean-going films. Men in polo-neck sweaters and black Wellingtons running on to the bridge and asking about the enemy. There's always a little guy with a mop who says simple important things that all the bigger guys ignore. Later in the film, when the ship's going down, the little guy's the only one who's small enough to jam his body in the gaping hole and stop the sea pouring in. He doesn't look like a hero but he is one. He's there to make all the small men feel brave.