Sexing the Cherry (2 page)

One night Jordan took me sailing. We set off when the tide was high and the day was ebbing. We sailed down the Thames and out into the sea and I kept looking back and marvelling at how quickly the sights I knew best vanished. Jordan said the stars can take you anywhere. On either side low buildings hung over the water, their floors well raised on poles. Here and there the dredgers waded in between these poles, swirling the dark mass with their sticks and filling their wicker baskets with rubbish. Only a week ago one found an anchor said to have come from Rome when we were all barbarians with our hair at our waists. The dredgers have no pride and will duck into the filth for anything. It is true that one of their company lives in a fine manor house in Chelsea, but for all his elevation he and his wife and brats still resemble the waste that sustains them. She is a brown string and he is a great turd. Their children fill up the lawn like rabbit droppings. I am a sinner, and common withal, but if I had trade enough for a rope of pearls I'd wash my neck before I wore them.

Jordan told me to put on my best clothes for our voyage. I did so, and a plumed hat that sat on my head as a bird nests in a tree. He gave me a comfortable seat and asked me ten times or more whether I was warm enough. I was warm. I was seeing the world.

When it was fully dark Jordan lit lanterns round the sides of the boat. He came to me and said it was the shortest night of the year and that in a few hours the sun would be up and I would see something Pd never seen before. He wouldn't say anything else, and I racked my brains to think what flights of fancy he might have made for me. Besides, I pride myself on having seen more than most, including a mummy from Egypt. I didn't see the bandages themselves but I saw the gilded tomb as it passed through London on its way to Enstone. It was a present from good Queen Henrietta to a favourite of hers who had made a wondrous garden full of continental devices.

And I have seen a banana.

What, then, could Jordan have prepared?

We waited in the boat with the soft smacking on either side and Jordan told me stories of the places he'd been and the plants he'd brought back to England. He's seen all the French ways, and the Italian too, and he's been to Persia with John Tradescant. Tradescant died soon after Jordan brought the first pineapple to England, but in the years before he filled his house in Lambeth with oddities and rarities from the far ends of the earth. 'The Ark', as it pleased him to call his home, was so jammed with curiosities that a visitor might never find room to hang his hat. But the very great went there, including the King, and I have seen the King. What wonders are there left?

'Look,' said Jordan.

We were out at sea. Grey waves with white heads. A thin line in the distance where the sky dropped into the water. There were no birds, no buildings, no people and no boats. A light wind ruffled us.

Then we saw the sun. We saw the sun rising over the water, and the light got louder and louder until we were shouting to make ourselves heard, and I saw the sun on Jordan's face, and the last glimmer of the lanterns, and against the final trace of the moon a flight of seagulls that came from nowhere and seemed to be born of the sun itself.

We stayed where we were in the rocking water until the night fishermen came in silent convoy. They hailed us and threw Jordan two fishes and then, looking at me, they threw him a third.

I had brought a loaf of bread, and we cooked our breakfast and left the remains to the circling gulls. Then we sailed home with the sun on our backs, and as we entered the Thames I looked behind me once. What I remember is the shining water and the size of the world.

The shining water and the size of the world.

I have seen both again and again since I left my mother on the banks of the black Thames, but in my mind it is always the same place I return to, and that one place not the most beautiful nor the most surprising.

To escape from the weight of the world, I leave my body where it is, in conversation or at dinner, and walk through a series of winding streets to a house standing back from the road.

The streets are badly lit and the distance from one side to the other no more than the span of my arms. The stone crumbles, the cobbles are uneven. The people who throng the streets shout at each other, their voices rising from the mass of heads and floating upwards towards the church spires and the great copper bells that clang the end of the day. Their words, rising up, form a thick cloud over the city, which everyso often must be thoroughly cleansed of too much language. Men and women in balloons fly up from the main square and, armed with mops and scrubbing brushes, do battle with the canopy of words trapped under the sun.

The words resist erasure. The oldest and most stubborn form a thick crust of chattering rage. Cleaners have been bitten by words still quarrelling, and in one famous lawsuit a woman whose mop had been eaten and whose hand was badly mauled by a vicious row sought to bring the original antagonists to court. The men responsible made their defence on the grounds that the words no longer belonged to them. Years had passed. Was it their fault if the city had failed to deal with its overheads? The judge ruled against the plaintiff but ordered the city to buy her a new mop. She was not satisfied, and was later found lining the chimneys of her accused with vitriol.

I once accompanied a cleaner in a balloon and was amazed to hear, as the sights of the city dropped away, a faint murmuring like bees. The murmuring grew louder and louder till it sounded like the clamouring of birds, then like the deafening noise of schoolchildren let out for the holidays. She pointed with her mop and I saw a vibrating mass of many colours appear before us. We could no longer speak to each other and be heard.

She aimed her mop at a particularly noisy bright red band of words who, from what I could make out, had escaped from a group of young men on their way home from a brothel. I could see from the set of my companion's mouth that she found this particular job distasteful, but she persevered, and in a few moments all that remained was the fading pink of a few ghostly swear-words.

Next we were attacked by a black cloud of wrath spewed from a parson caught fornicating his mother. The cloud wrapped round the balloon and I feared for our lives. I could not see my guide but I could hear her coughing against the noxious smell. Suddenly I was drenched in a sweet fluid and all returned to lightness.

'I have conquered them with Holy Water/ she said, showing me a stone jar marked with the Bishop's seal.

After that our task was much easier. Indeed I was sorry to see the love-sighs of young girls swept away. My companion, though she told me it was strictly forbidden, caught a sonnet in a wooden box and gave it to me as a memento. If I open the box by the tiniest amount I may hear it, repeating itself endlessly as it is destined to do until someone sets it free.

Towards the end of the day we joined with the other balloons brushing away the last few stray and vagabond words. The sky under the setting sun was the colour of veined marble, and a great peace surrounded us. As we descended through the clean air we saw, passing us by from time to time, new flocks of words coming from the people in the streets who, not content with the weight of their lives, continually turned the heaviest of things into the lightest of properties.

We landed outside the university, where the dons, whose arguments had so thickly populated the ether that they had seen neither sun nor rain for the past five years, welcomed us like heroes and took us in to feast.

That night two lovers whispering under the lead canopy of the church were killed by their own passion. Their effusion of words, unable to escape through the Saturnian discipline of lead, so filled the spaces of the loft that the air was all driven away. The lovers suffocated, but when the sacristan opened the tiny door the words tumbled him over in their desire to be free, and were seen flying across the city in the shape of doves.

When Jordan was a boy he made paper boats and floated them on the river. From this he learned how the wind affects a sail, but he never learned how love affects the heart. His patience was exceeded only by his hope. He spent days and nights with his bits of wood salvaged from chicken crates, and any piece of paper he could steal became a sail. I used to watch him standing in the mud or lying face down, his nose almost in the current, his hands steadying the boat and then letting it go straight into the wind. Letting go hours of himself. When the time came he did the same with his heart. He didn't believe in shipwreck.

And he came home to me with his boats broken and his face streaked with tears, and we sat with our lamp and mended what we could, and the next day was the first day all over again. But when he lost his heart there was no one to sit with him. He was alone.

In the city of words that I have told you about the smell of wild strawberries was the smell characteristic of the house that I have not yet told you about. The runners of these plants spread from the beds bounded by stone tiles and fastened themselves over terracotta pots and flaking ironwork and hid the big flags that paved the courtyard. Anyone coming to the outer gate would find themselves confronted by waves of green dotted underneath with tiny red berries, some clutched in spiders' webs like forgotten rubies. There was a way through to an oaked door, and beyond the door the square hall of the house with other doors leading off it. There were four suits of armour in the hall, and a mace.

The family who lived hi the house were dedicated to a strange custom. Not one of them would allow their feet to touch the floor. Open the doors off the hall and you will see, not floors, but bottomless pits. The furniture of the house is suspended on racks from the ceiling; the dining table supported by great chains, each link six inches thick. To dine here is a great curiosity, for the visitor must sit in a gilded chair and allow himself to be winched up to join his place setting. He comes last, the householders already seated and making merry, swinging their feet over the abyss where crocodiles live. Everyone who dines has a multiplicity of glasses and cutlery lest some should be dropped accidentally. Whatever food is left over at the end of the meal is scraped into the pit, from whence a fearful crunching can be heard.

When everyone has eaten their fill, the gentlemen remain at the table and the ladies walk in order of precedence across a tightrope to another room, where they may have biscuits and wine with water.

It is well known that the ceiling of one room is the floor of another, but the household ignores this ever-downward necessity and continues ever upward, celebrating ceilings but denying floors, and so their house never ends and they must travel by winch or rope from room to room, calling to one another as they go.

The house is empty now, but it was there, dangling over dinner, illuminated by conversation and rich in the juices of a wild duck, that I noticed a woman whose face was a sea voyage I had not the courage to attempt.

I did not speak to her, though I spoke to all the rest, and at midnight she put on flat pumps and balanced the yards of rope without faltering. She was a dancer.