Sexing the Cherry (14 page)

When I was little my mother took me to see a great wonder. It was about 1633,1 think, and never before had there been a banana in England. I saw it held high above a man's head. It was yellow and speckled brown, and as I looked at it I saw the tree and the beach and the white waves below birds with wide wings. Then I forgot it completely. But in my games with ships and plants I was trying to return to that memory, to release whatever it had begun in me.

When Tradescant asked me to go with him as an explorer I thought I might be a hero after all, and bring back something that mattered, and in the process find something I had lost. The sense of loss was hard to talk about. What could I have lost when I never had anything to begin with?

I had myself to begin with, and that is what I lost. Lost it in my mother because she is bigger and stronger than me and that's not how it's supposed to be with sons. But lost it more importantly in the gap between my ideal of myself and my pounding heart.

I want to be brave and admired and have a beautiful wife and a fine house. I want to be a hero and wave goodbye to my wife and children at the docks, and be sorry to see them go but more excited about what is to come. I want to be like other men, one of the boys, a back-slapper and a man who knows a joke or two. I want to be like my rip-roaring mother who cares nothing for how she looks, only for what she does. She has never been in love, no, and never wanted to be either. She is self-sufficient and without self-doubt. Before I left I took her down the Thames and out to sea but I don't know if it made any impression on her, or even how much she noticed. We never talked much. She is silent, the way men are supposed to be. I often caught her staring at me as though she had never seen me before; she seemed to be learning me. I think she loves me but I don't know. She wouldn't say so; perhaps she doesn't know herself. When I left, I think it was relief she felt at being able to continue her old life with the dogs and the dredgers and the whores she likes. Even while Tradescant was talking about it she got up and went for a walk. She was busy with her own mind, but I was hurt.

We never discussed whether or not I would go; she took it for granted, almost as though she had expected it. I wanted her to ask me to stay, just as I now want Fortunata to ask me to stay.

Why do they not?

For Tradescant, being a hero comes naturally. His father was a hero before him. The journeys he makes can be tracked on any map and he knows what he's looking for. He wants to bring back rarities and he does.

Our ship, which is weighing anchor some miles from this island, is full of fruit and spices and new plants. When we get home, men and women will crowd round us and ask us what happened and every version we tell will be a little more fanciful. But it will be real, whereas if I begin to tell my story about where I've been or where I think I've been, who will believe me? In a boy it might be indulged, but I'm not a boy any more, I'm a man.

I've kept the log book for the ship. Meticulously. And I've kept a book of my own, and for every journey we have made together I've written down my own journey and drawn my own map. I can't show this to the others, but I believe it to be a faithful account of what happened, at least, of what happened to me.

Are we all living like this? Two lives, the ideal outer life and the inner imaginative life where we keep our secrets?

Curiously, the further I have pursued my voyages the more distant they have become. For Tradescant, voyages can be completed. They occupy time comfortably. With some leeway, they are predictable. I have set off and found that there is no end to even the simplest journey of the mind. I begin, and straight away a hundred alternative routes present themselves. I choose one, no sooner begin, than a hundred more appear. Every time I try to narrow down my intent I expand it, and yet those straits and canals still lead me to the open sea, and then I realize how vast it all is, this matter of the mind. I am confounded by the shining water and the size of the world.

The Buddhists say there are 149 ways to God. I'm not looking for God, only for myself, and that is far more complicated. God has had a great deal written about Him; nothing has been written about me. God is bigger, like my mother, easier to find, even in the dark. I could be anywhere, and since I can't describe myself I can't ask for help. We are alone in this quest, and Fortunate is right not to disguise it, though she may be wrong about love. I have met a great many pilgrims on their way towards God and I wonder why they have chosen to look for him rather than themselves. Perhaps Fm missing the point - perhaps whilst looking for someone else you might come across yourself unexpectedly, in a garden somewhere or on a mountain watching the rain. But they don't seem to care about who they are. Some of them have told me that the very point of searching for God is to forget about oneself, to lose oneself for ever. But it is not difficult to lose oneself, or is it the ego they are talking about, the hollow, screaming cadaver that has no spirit within it?

I think that cadaver is only the ideal self run mad, and if the other life, the secret life, could be found and brought home, then a person might live in peace and have no need for God. After all, He has no need for us, being complete.

I have packed my striped bag and taken my coat from the hook where Fortunata put it. She has come to see me off and we are standing together by my boat, which is still staggered with rocks in a high hollow.

Her hair is down, it reaches almost to her waist. She looks serene.

Til come back another day,' I say.

She smiles at me and says nothing, and even as I say it I know it won't be true. She will elude me, she and this island will slip sideways in time and I'll never find them again, except perhaps in a dream.

I throw my things into the boat and shove my shoulder against it and push it out into the water. Far away, a black dot is Tradescant's ship. He won't wait much longer.

She wades into the water with me, deep enough to wet the bottom of her hair, and takes my face in both her hands and kisses me on the mouth. Then she turns away and I watch her walk back across the sand and up over the rocks. I begin to row, using her body as a marker.

I always will.

The pineapple arrived today.

Jordan carried it in his arms as though it were a yellow baby; with the wisdom of Solomon he prepared to slice it in two. He had not sharpened the knife before Mr Rose, the royal gardener, flung himself across the table and begged to be sawn into bits instead. Those at the feast contorted themselves with laughter, and the King himself, in his new wig, came down from the dais and urged Mr Rose to delay his sacrifice. It was, after all, only a fruit. At this Mr Rose poked up his head from his abandonment amongst the dishes and reminded the company that this was an historic occasion. Indeed it was. It was 1661, and from Jordan's voyage to Barbados the first pineapple had come to England.

Tradescant is dead. Cromwell is dead. Ireton and Bradshaw, the King's prosecutors, frequently found together beneath soiled sheets, are dead. Jordan missed a pretty sight, sailing too late with his yellow cargo. Cromwell, Ireton and Bradshaw, who had thought to lie peacefully in Westminster Abbey, that place of sanctity they had denied their rightful King, were dug out on 30 January and hung up for all to see on the gallows at Tyburn. That was a moment for a scented handkerchief. Not everyone has as strong a constitution as myself. Thousands of us flocked to watch them swinging in the wind, what was left of them, decay having made no exception for their eminence. The people were mightily pleased to see the thing and a number of stalls sprang up right beneath the bony feet, selling apples and hot biscuits. A gypsy with a crown of stars offered to tell fortunes, but when she looked at my hand she looked away. I was not discouraged; I am enough to make my own fortune in this pock-marked world.

It did render me philosophical, though, to sit at Tyburn and watch the merriment and the great wonder of passers-by, especially small children, who had never thought what it might mean to rot.

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.