Sexing the Cherry

  It is a true saying, that what you fear you find.

  My neighbour, who has a fondness for Preacher Scroggs, largely since like finds like, was addressing me in the most pompous terms about the Will of God, as though he knew God as well as I do my dogs. Thus was I forced to shout him down, reason being wasted on a block, and thus did Tradescant find me.

  'Madam, madam, calm yourself,' he said in his gentle way.

  I turned, and though I hadn't seen him for two years I recognized him at once.

  'Mr Tradescant,' I said, 'I am defending the King.'

  'A noble cause,' said he.

  At this my neighbour claimed he'd never kneel before a king until he knelt before Jesus. Any time now, he said, the Rule of Saints would begin on earth and all the sinners would be burned up and confounded.

  I had no choice but to strangle him, and though I used only one hand and held him from the ground at arm's length, he was purple in no time and poor John Tradescant was swinging on my arm like a little monkey, begging me to stop.

  I'll spare him for your sake, sir,' I said, and dropped the ugly thing into his own midden.

  I thought no more of him but took Tradescant into our house for a pot of ale. He seemed pale, no doubt from his journey.

  I've come about Jordan,' he said.

  And it seemed that he wanted a gardener's boy at Wimbledon where he was laying out a great garden for Queen Henrietta. He refused to let the troubles interrupt his work. He had it in his mind that when the Queen returned from the Continent in triumph to the King, bringing the children who were hidden for safety, the garden would stand as a monument to her courage.

  But how could I lose Jordan, so dear to me and my only comfort?

  Tradescant tried all his gentle ways to persuade me. I continued to refuse, saying it was too far for my boy to travel daily. And yet I wanted Jordan to have the work, knowing how it would delight him to see such exotic things growing all in one place. At length I hit on a solution.

  I'll accompany him,' I said.

  Tradescant seemed surprised, so I continued.

  'I have a mind to take the air of Wimbledon for a time.'

  There's nowhere for you to live,' he said. 'Jordan will have to share with the other men of the estate.'

  I have a flair for architecture, having built my own hut, and I assured Tradescant that I could build another.

  He spread his hands, he sighed, but I knew I had beaten him.

  'And my hounds, I must bring them.'

  He asked me how many I had, and I comforted him that there were just a few at present.

  'When can I expect you?'

  'We will begin our journey tomorrow. In what direction is Wimbledon?'

  He said the coachman would be sure to know, and as he seemed in a hurry to leave I did not press him, thinking I could find out from the innkeeper at the Crown of Thorns.

  It was three days later that a half-wit went foaming and stuttering to Mr Tradescant, crying that the garden had been invaded by an evil spirit and her Hounds of Hell. Tradescant came running to the great gates, and he must have been relieved to see it was only myself holding Jordan by the hand.

  'Your dogs,' he said, and I saw his Adam's apple bobbing up and down.

  'Yes,' I replied, 'no more than thirty and only five ready for breeding.'

  He was a gentleman, and if he had seemed taken aback he soon recovered himself and asked if he might pay for our carriage and perhaps send help to fetch our belongings.

  There is no carriage,' I told him, 'and here are our belongings.'

  I raised a bundle of red cloth like a great Christmas pudding.

  Jordan had his boat under his arm.

  'But how... ?'

  'We walked,' I said. 'And when Jordan was tired I carried him.'

  Tradescant said nothing, but tried to take my bundle, which immediately flattened him to the ground. Very tenderly, as a mother knows how, I scooped him up in my arms, the bundle prostitutes kept by a rich man for his friends. The women were gracious but urged me to return in female disguise. That way I might be granted admittance. As a man, however chaste, I would be driven away or made a eunuch.

  I did as they advised and came to them in a simple costume hired for the day. They praised my outfit and made me blush by stroking my cheek and commenting on its smoothness.

  We drank unfortified wine, and when the custodian passed and asked who it was they were entertaining one stood up and said I was her cousin from afar.

  They knew nothing of the dancer. She was not of their company, though they promised to enquire among friends. How could they bear such privation?

  Their quarters were very comfortable, with every kind of couch and bed and game to play, but they were not allowed to go outside.

  How could they live without space?

  There was silence, and it seemed as though they were communicating without words. Then one spoke to me and explained that they were not so confined as it seemed. That through the night they came and went as they pleased.

  How could this be? The house was barred. Each door had thirteen locks. The windows were too high to reach and the skylights, though always kept open, could not be broached.

  Underneath the house was a stream. The stream, on its way to the river on its way to the sea, passed beneath the lodgings of quite a different set of women. Nuns. This convent, the Convent of the Holy Mother, had its cellars opening over the stream. Every night, any of the women who wished to amuse herself in the city, visit friends, eat dinner with her beloved, dropped herself into the fast-flowing water and was carried downstream towards the convent. It was the custom of the nuns to keep watch over the stream through the night, and any of the women shooting past the convent vault was immediately fished out in a great shrimping net by the nun on duty.

  Some of the women had lovers in the convent; others, keeping a change of clothes there, went their way in the outside world. At dawn the women were let down into the water, and with great fortitude swam upstream into their locked citadel.

  Their owner, being a short-sighted man of scant intelligence, never noticed that the women under his care were always different. There was an unspoken agreement in the city that any woman who wanted to amass a fortune quickly would go and work in the house and rob the clients and steal the ornaments supposedly safe on the wall. He did not know it but this selfish man, to whom life was just another commodity, had financed the futures of thousands of women, who were now across the world or trading in shops or as merchants. He had also, singlehanded, paid for the convent's renowned stock of fine wine and any number of altarpieces.

  Some years later I heard that he had come into his pleasure chamber one day and found it absolutely empty of women and of treasures. He never fathomed the matter and made no connection between that event and the sudden increase in novitiates at the Convent of the Holy Mother.

  I have met a number of people who, anxious to be free of the burdens of their gender, have dressed themselves men as women and women as men.

  After my experience in the pen of prostitutes I decided to continue as a woman for a time and took a job on a fish stall.

  I noticed that women have a private language. A language not dependent on the constructions of men but structured by signs and expressions, and that uses ordinary words as code-words meaning something other.

  In my petticoats I was a traveller in a foreign country. I did not speak the language. I was regarded with suspicion.

  I watched women flirting with men, pleasing men, doing business with men, and then I watched them collapsing into laughter, sharing the joke, while the men, all unknowing, felt themselves master of the situation and went off to brag in barrooms and to preach from pulpits the folly of the weaker sex.

  This conspiracy of women shocked me. I like women; I am shy of them but I regard them highly. I never guessed how much they hate us or how deeply they pity us. They think we are children with too much pocket money. The woman who owned the fish stall warned me n
ever to try and cheat another woman but always to try and charge the men double or send them away

  1. Men are easy to please but are not pleased for long before some new novelty must delight them.

  2. Men are easy to make passionate but are unable to sustain it.

  3. Men are always seeking soft women but find their lives in ruins without strong women.

  4. Men must be occupied at all times otherwise they make mischief.

  5. Men deem themselves weighty and women light. Therefore it is simple to tie a stone round their necks and drown them should they become too troublesome.

  6. Men are best left in groups by themselves where they will entirely wear themselves out in drunkenness and competition. While this is taking place a woman may carry on with her own life unhindered.

  7. Men are never never to be trusted with what is closest to your heart, and if it is they who are closest to your heart, do not tell them.

  8. If a man asks you for money, do not give it to him.

  9. If you ask a man for money and he does not give it to you, sell his richest possession and leave at once.

  10. Your greatest strength is that every man believes he knows the sum and possibility of every woman.

  I was much upset when I read this first page, but observing my own heart and the behaviour of those around me I conceded it to be true. Then my heaviness was at its limit and I could not raise myself up from where I was sitting. But I did look around me and I saw that I was one in a long line of unfortunates sitting like crows on a fallen tree. All were wailing piteously and none could move on account of their sorrows.

  I was lucky that my hands were free, and reaching down into my fish basket I took out a red mullet and waved it over my head.

  Soon a flock of sea birds appeared screeching at the sight of the fish. I waved another in my left hand, and as I had hoped the birds dived to catch the fish.

  When they fastened their beaks on to my bait I did not let go and the birds, maddened at any resistance to their feeding, flapped all the harder and succeeded in pulling me up with them. I let go at once, but the birds, somehow imagining me as a great fish, carried me up into the air and flew me over the city and out to sea.

  Far below I watched the waves crashing against high cliffs and saw the sails of ships passing to the Tropics. I fainted from fear, and when I revived I was no longer in the air but seemed to be on the windowsill of a well-appointed house in a town I did not recognize. A young girl came to the window and, asking me if I were the sister she had prayed for, courteously invited me to bed with her, where I passed the night in some confusion.

  What is love?

  On the morning after our arrival at Wimbledon I awoke in a pool of philosophic thought, though comforted by Jordan's regular breathing and the snorts of my thirty dogs.

  I am too huge for love. No one, male or female, has ever dared to approach me. They are afraid to scale mountains.

  I wonder about love because the parson says that only God can truly love us and the rest is lust and selfishness.

  In church, there are carvings of a man with his member swollen out like a marrow, rutting a woman whose teats swish the ground like a cow before milking. She has her eyes closed and he looks up to Heaven, and neither of them notice the grass is on fire.

  The parson had these carvings done especially so that we could contemplate our sin and where it must lead.

  There are women too, hot with lust, their mouths sucking at each other, and men grasping one another the way you would a cattle prod.

  We file past every Sunday to humble ourselves and stay clean for another week, but I have noticed a bulge here and there where all should be quiet and God-like.

  For myself, the love I've known has come from my dogs, who care nothing for how I look, and from Jordan, who says that though I am as wide and muddy as the river that is his namesake, so am I too his kin. As for the rest of this sinning world, they treat me well enough for my knowledge and pass me by when they can.

  I breed boarhounds as my father did before me and as I hoped Jordan would do after me. But he would not stay. His head was stuffed with stories of other continents where men have their faces in their chests and some hop on one foot defying the weight of nature.

  These hoppers cover a mile at a bound and desire no sustenance other than tree-bark. It is well known that their companions are serpents, the very beast that drove us all from Paradise and makes us still to sin. These beasts are so wily that if they hear the notes of a snake-charmer they lay one ear to the earth and stopper up the other with their tails. Would I could save myself from sin by stoppering up my ears with a tail or any manner of thing.

  I am a sinner, not in body but in mind. I know what love sounds like because I have heard it through the wall, but I do not know what it feels like. What can it be like, two bodies slippery as eels on a mud-flat, panting like dogs after a Pig?

  I fell in love once, if love be that cruelty which takes us straight to the gates of Paradise only to remind us they are closed for ever.

  There was a boy who used to come by with a coatful of things to sell. Beads and ribbons hung on the inside and his pockets were crammed with fruit knives and handkerchiefs and buckles and bright thread. He had a face that made me glad.

  I used to get up an hour early and comb my hair, which normally I would do only at Christmas-time in honour of our Saviour. I decked myself in my best clothes like a bullock at a fair, but none of this made him notice me and I felt my heart shrivel to the size of a pea. Whenever he turned his back to leave I always stretched out my hand to hold him a moment, but his shoulder-blades were too sharp to touch. I drew his image in the dirt by my bed and named all my mother's chickens after him.

  Eventually I decided that true love must be clean love and I boiled myself a cake of soap...

  I hate to wash, for it exposes the skin to contamination. I follow the habit of King James, who only ever washed his fingertips and yet was pure in heart enough to give us the Bible in good English.

  I hate to wash, but knowing it to be a symptom of love I was not surprised to find myself creeping towards the pump in the dead of night like a ghoul to a tomb. I had determined to cleanse all of my clothes, my underclothes and myself. I did this in one passage by plying at the pump handle, first with my right arm and washing my left self, then with my left arm and washing my right self. When I was so drenched that to wring any part of me left a puddle at my feet I waited outside the baker's until she began her work and sat myself by the ovens until morning. I had a white coating from the flour, but that served to make my swarthy skin more fair.

  In this new state I presented myself to my loved one, who graced me with all of his teeth at once and swore that if only he could reach my mouth he would kiss me there and then. I swept him from his feet and said, 'Kiss me now,' and closed my eyes for the delight. I kept them closed for some five minutes and then, opening them to see what had happened, I saw that he had fainted dead away. I carried him to the pump that had last seen my devotion and doused him good and hard, until he came to, wriggling like a trapped fox, and begged me let him down.

  'What is it?' I cried. 'Is it love for me that affects you so?'

  'No,' he said. 'It is terror.'

  I saw him a few months later in another part of town with a pretty jade on his arm and his face as bright as ever.

  In the morning the young girl, whose name was Zillah, told me she had been locked in this tower since her birth.

  This is not a tower,' I said. 'It is a house of some stature but nothing more.'

  'No,' she said. 'You are mistaken. Go to the window.'

  I did as she asked, and looked down a few feet over a street setting up for market. Women in leather aprons were piling radishes on wooden stalls, a priest was blessing a cargo of Holy Relics, while a saintly man, come early, was arguing over the price of a rib.

  It was a fine morning; the air smelt of lemons.

  As I looked down a stallholder turned his face
and stared directly at me. I waved and smiled but he gave no sign of recognition. It did not trouble me; people are nervous of strangers.

  'Is it not terrifying?' said Zillah.

  Then I knew she must be having a game with me and I went and pulled her to the window.

  'Come and see this steeple of radishes.'

  She was silent. I noticed how pale her face was, and that her eyes were unnaturally bright. I leaned over to point out anything that might please her but the words stuck to the roof of my mouth. She was gazing down. I followed her gaze, down and further down. We were at the top of a sheer-built tower. The stone cylinder fell without relief to a platform of bitter rocks smashed by foaming waves. The coastline winding away was desolate of living things. No hut or sheepfold broke the line of tangled rosemary bushes. There was nothing but the wind and the slate-blue sea.

  She pulled away from me and went to sit down on the bed.

  With my back to the window I asked her what it was that kept her here.

  'It is myself,' she said. 'Only myself.'

  It was then I realized the room had no door.

  'Is there anything for me to eat?' I asked her.

  She smiled, leaned under the bed and pulled out two rats by their tails.

  She laughed, and walked towards me, the rats in each hand. Her eyes were clouding over, her eyes were disappearing. I could smell her breath like cheese in muslin.

  I did not think of my life; I somersaulted out of the window and landed straight in the pile of radishes.

  The woman in the leather apron hit me over the head, but someone behind her, pulling her off, took me by the shoulders and urged me to tell him where I had come from so suddenly.

  'From the tower,' I said, pointing upwards.

  The market stopped its bustle and all fell to the ground and made the sign of the cross. The purveyor of Holy Relics hung a set of martyrs' teeth round his neck and sprinkled me with the dust of St Anthony.

  The story was a terrible one.

  A young girl caught incestuously with her sister was condemned to build her own death tower. To prolong her life she built it as high as she could, winding round and round with the stones in an endless stairway. When there were no stones left she sealed the room and the village, driven mad by her death cries, evacuated to a far-off spot where no one could hear her. Many years later the tower had been demolished by a foreigner who had built the house I saw in its place. Slowly the village had returned, but not the foreigner, nor anyone else, could live in the house. At night the cries were too loud.