Sexing the Cherry (13 page)

After some time I heard a sound like music, but not like any music I had heard, and I tracked the noise to a pair of doors which seemed to be bolted. Above the door was a glass pane, and by careful scrambling I was able to balance on the door knobs and peer into the room.

What I saw astonished me.

There appeared to be ten points of light spiralling in a line along the floor, and from these beings came the sound I had heard. It was harmonic but it had no tune. I could hardly bear to look at the light, and the tone, though far from unpleasant, hurt my ears. It was too rich, too strong, to be music.

Then I saw a young woman, darting in a figure of eight in between the lights and turning her hands through it as a potter turns clay on the wheel. At last she stood back, and one by one I watched the light form into a head and arms and legs. Slower and slower, the sound dying with the light, until on the floor were ten women, their shoes in holes, their bodies wet with sweat.

I fell off the door knobs.

When I came to I was in a much smaller room, propped in a chair on one side of the fire. Opposite me, attentive and smiling, was the woman I had first seen at dinner, what seemed like years ago and might have been days.

'My name is Jordan,' I said.

MEMORY I: The scene I have just described to you may lie in the future or the past. Either I have found Fortunata or I will find her. I cannot be sure. Either I am remembering her or I am still imagining her. But she is somewhere in the grid of time, a co-ordinate, as I am.

'My name is Fortunata,' she said. 'This is the first thing I saw. It was winter. The ground was hard and white. There were late roses in the hedges, wild and red, and the holly tree was dark green with blazing berries. It snowed every day, dense curtains of snow that wiped out the footprints coming to and from the house, leaving us to believe that no one ever came here or ever had. One day a robin landed on my windowsill and sank immediately. I dug it out with a teaspoon and it flew away, the snow falling like fetters from its wings. Because the snow was so deep it muffled the noise we made, and we crept about like a silent order, exchanging glances and surprising one another in the garden, where we moved in slow motion, each step shifting feet of snow like sand-dunes.

'As it grew colder and the snow hardened we carved statues from it, scenes from the Bible and the Greek heroes.

'It was the winter of our marriage, my sisters and I. We were to be married all together, all twelve of us on the same day. On New Year's Day, in blood-red dresses with our black hair.

'We decided to build a church in our garden. We built it out of the ice, and it cut our hands and the blood stained the snow like the wild red roses in the hedges. We worked without speaking, only pausing twice a day for meals and lighting up the dark with flares so that we could continue in spite of the shortness of the hours. It was finished the day before the ceremonies. The night before, our last night together as sisters, we slept as always in a long line of single beds beneath the white sheets and blankets like those who have fallen asleep in the snow. From this room, in the past, we had flown to a silver city that knew neither day nor night, and in that city we had danced for joy thinking nothing of the dawn where we lived.

'When it was dawn on our wedding day we dressed in our red dresses and unplaited our hair, and when we were ready we closed and locked the great windows that had been our means of escape and walked in single file from our bedroom down the marble staircase to the frozen church. We were married one by one under branches of mistletoe, but when it came to my turn, and I was the last, I looked at my husband to be, the youngest prince, who had followed us in secret and found us out, and I did not want him.

'At the last possible moment I pushed him aside and ran out of the church through the crowds of guests, mouths open like fishes.

'I took a boat and sailed round the world earning my living as a dancer. Eventually I came here and built this school. I never advertise. People find me because they want to, as you have.'

'I have met your sisters/ I said, and told her how they were all living together again in one place, and related the story of their various divorces.

'But the story they told me about you was not the same. That you escaped, yes, but that you flew away and walked on a wire stretched from the steeple of the church to the mast of a ship at anchor in the bay.'

She laughed. How could such a thing be possible?

'But,' I said, 'how could it be possible to fly every night from the window to an enchanted city when there are no such places?'

'Are there not such places?' she said, and I fell silent, not knowing how to answer.

LIES 8: It was not the first thing she saw, how could it have been? Nor was the night in the fog-covered field the first thing I saw. But before then we were like those who dream and pass through life as a series of shadows. And so what we have told you is true, although it is not.

Before the great snows and the fields of ice of which I have told you, my sisters and I flew through the window night after night and danced in a silver city of curious motion. The city itself danced. It had the sensation of being on board ship, of being heaved from corner to corner on top of the tossing tide.

To begin with no one in the city danced. They paid their taxes and brought up their children and ate and slept like the rest of this world. But that was when the city was also like the rest of this world and seemed to be still. Of course, some of the cleverer people knew that the world is endlessly in motion, but since they could not feel it they ignored it.

In the middle of summer, when the dying sun bled the blue sky orange, the movement began. At first it was no more than a tremor, then an upheaval, and everyone ran to put their silver in boxes and to tie up the dog.

During the night the shifting continued, and although no one was hurt the doctor of the place issued a written warning to the effect that anyone whose teeth were false should remove them in case of sudden choking. The prudent applied this to hairpieces and false limbs and soon the vaults of the town hall were filled with spare human matter.

As the weeks went by, and it became clear that the underground activity had neither ceased nor worsened, a few brave citizens tried to make the best of it and strung ropes from one point to another, as supports to allow them to go about their business. In time all of the people started to adjust to their new rolling circumstances and it was discovered that the best way to overcome the problem was to balance above it. The ropes were no longer used as supports but as walkways and roads, and everyone, even those who had piled up their limbs in the town hall, learned to be acrobats. Carrying coloured umbrellas to help them balance, they walked in soft shoes from their homes to their usual haunts.

A few generations passed, and no one remembered that the city had ever been like any other, or that the ground was a more habitual residence. Houses were built in the treetops and the birds, disgusted by this invasion of their privacy, swept even higher, cawing and chirping from the banks of clouds.

As it became natural for the citizens to spend their lives suspended, the walking turned to leaping, and leaping into dancing, so that no one bothered to go sedately where they could twist in points of light.

Then there was an accident.

A young girl coming home along a slippery and frayed line of rope missed her footing and fell into the blank space below. There was a cry of horror from everyone who saw it, but the girl did not drop and crack on the ground, she floated.

After a few simple experiments it became certain that for the people who had abandoned gravity, gravity had abandoned them. There was a general rejoicing, and from that day forth no one concerned themselves with floors or with falling, though it was still thought necessary to build a ceiling in your house in order to place the chandelier.

Now I have told you the history of the city, which is a logical one, each piece fitting into the other without strain. Sure that you must believe something so credible I will continue with the story of our nightly arrival in that city and the sad means of our discovery...

The city, being freed from the laws of gravity, began to drift upwards for some 200 miles, until it was out of the earth's atmosphere. It lay for a while above Africa and then began to circle the earth at leisure, never in one place for long, but in other respects like some off-shore island. The citizens had enormous poles made to push themselves off from stars or meteors, and in this way used their town as a raft to travel where they wanted. They did not know it, but when every person pushed with their pole the force created a counter-force, a kind of vacuum that sucked up anything in its wake. The force was very powerful, and all over the world there are stories of entire picnics that have disappeared from checked tablecloths, and small children who have never been seen again.

The citizens always took kindly to whatever their movement sucked up, and ate the food and looked after the children and sailed on.

My sisters and I have always been light. When my third sister was born she was prevented from banging her head against the ceiling only by the umbilical cord. Without that she would have come from the womb and ascended straight upwards.

My fifth sister was so light that she rode on the back of our house cat until she was twelve.

Of course, we were fattened up and given heavy clothing to wear, but our ballgowns were not heavy, and when we danced we were the envy of all the rest because our feet seemed never to touch the floor. Fortunately our dresses were long, and so no one caught sight of us, floating.

And so, when the weightless city was directly overhead, though utterly concealed, we were the first to feel the pull of its counter-force, and on the same night we found ourselves being dragged out of bed and slammed up against the window like a dozen flies.

We held council amongst ourselves about what to do, and we decided that there were only two possibilities: either we could ballast ourselves against further attack, or we could open ourselves to whatever might happen. Our vote was unanimous, and on the following night we lay in bed in our ballgowns and waited.

At about one in the morning, when my father's snores were rattling the house, our windows flew open and we were pulled through them, hanging on to each other by our plaits. In an instant we had reached the city, and after our initial surprise we joined in the dancing and the merriment until dawn.

It was then that we encountered our first and only difficulty.

How were we to get back?

After various unprofitable discussions I remembered how Cyrano de Bergerac had attempted to launch himself at the moon by clinging on to the kind of metal that the moon attracted to herself, being magnetic. It seemed to me that the earth, weighed down as it is by gravity, would most likely attract lead to itself, and with this in mind we filled our boots with it and sat upon a sheet of it like a doleful magic carpet. We then bade the people cast us off, which they did with many tears, feeling sure that we would never be seen again.

They were wrong. The lead worked perfectly and we landed on the church roof at the back of our own house. From there it was an easy climb between the chimney stacks, down the wisteria and into bed.

Our happiness continued night after night until my father noticed our pale faces and tired eyes and set a watch on us. But we were cunning and always drugged whoever was on duty, and continued as before. Imagine our horror, then, when my father announced that anyone able to tell where it was we went at night would be rewarded by any one of us in marriage.

Not surprisingly, princes came from every land, and most of them were easy to fool, and we grew too confident.

Our end came in this way.

The people of the floating city had told us it was time for them to anchor in some other place, and asked if we would like to live with them for ever. We agreed that we would, and it was arranged that after a night of celebration we would slip home, collect a few possessions and return in time to drift through space for ever. It was the night of the youngest prince, a cunning fellow who guessed at our sleeping draught and who clung to our skirts when we flew away. He was light and invisible and hid between the lanterns and the trees, and no one saw him. When we travelled home on our sheet of lead he was clinging to the underside like a beetle.

The following night, as we were ready to leave and all was happiness, the doors of our chamber burst open and my father came in lit by torches and surrounded by servants.

There was no escape and, to contain us, our ankles were chained and the prince came to stay with his eleven brothers.

Very often in the days that followed we looked at the sky and thought where we might be and knew where we were.

And the rest of the story you know.

I stayed with Fortunata for one month, learning more about her ways and something about my own. She told me that for years she had lived in hope of being rescued; of belonging to someone else, of dancing together. And then she had learned to dance alone, for its own sake and for hers.

'And love?' I said.

She spread her hands and gave me a short lecture on the habits of the starfish.

It was later that I took my medallion from round my neck and put it over her head. She turned it up towards her and read the inscription. 'Remember the rock from whence ye are hewn and the pit from whence ye are digged.'

She laughed. 'What about your wings?' she said. 'How can you forget those when the stumps are still deep in your shoulder-blades?'

I didn't say anything. In the Bible only the angels have wings; the rest of us have to wait to be rescued.

PAINTINGS 2: 'St Nicholas Calming the Tempest'. A small boat on a blue-black sea. The tempest rages and the four disciples huddle together in fear. Beneath the boat is a great fish, and up above, in full dress and mitre, comes St Nicholas flying through the sky. The stars hang about him.

I am getting ready to leave. Fortunata will not come with me and I cannot stay here, though part of me also belongs to the wilderness. I thought she might want to travel but she tells me truths I already know, that she need not leave this island to see the world, she has seas and cities enough in her mind. If she does, if we all do, it may be that this world and the moon and stars are also a matter of the mind, though a mind of vaster scope than ours. If someone is thinking me, then I am still free to come and go. It will not be like chess, this thoughtful universe, it will be a theatre of changing sets, where we could walk through walls if we wanted, but do not, being faithful to our own sense of the dramatic.