Sexing the Cherry (17 page)

It seems obvious, doesn't it, that someone who is ignored and overlooked will expand to the point where they have to be noticed, even if the noticing is fear and disgust.

I imagined my parents' house as a shell to contain me. An environment suitable for a fantastic creature who needed to suck in the warmth and nourishment until it was ready to shrug off the shell and burst out. At night, in bed, I felt the whole house breathing in and out as I did. The roof tiles, the bricks, the lagging, the plumbing, all were subject to my rhythm. I was a monster in a carpeted egg.

There I go, my shoulders pushing into the corners of the room, my head uncurling and smashing the windows. Shards of glass everywhere, the garden trodden in a single footprint. Micromegas, 200 miles high.

But there is no Rabelaisian dimension for rage.

When I left home, predictably, I lost weight. Wheelbarrows full of weight. Two wheelbarrows, in fact, that's what I worked out.

Where did it go? Where does it come from and where does it go? It's one of the mysteries of matter, that fat appears and then disappears again, and all you have to say it ever was are a few stretchmarks and some outsize clothes.

'You'll burn it off,' my mother used to say, and when I was a child I had visions of myself stoking a great furnace with fat. The smoke that came out of the chimney was curly, like pigs' tails.

When the weight had gone I found out something strange: that the weight persisted in my mind. I had an
alter ego
who was huge and powerful, a woman whose only morality was her own and whose loyalties were fierce and few. She was my patron saint, the one I called on when I felt myself dwindling away through cracks in the floor or slowly fading in the street. Whenever I called on her I felt my muscles swell and laughter fill up my throat. Of course it was only a fantasy, at least at the beginning...

As a chemist with a good degree, and as an attractive woman whom men liked to work with, I could have taught in a university or got a job doing worthy work behind the scenes. I needn't have gone into pollution research. It's odious in every way. Big companies hate you and continually set their in-house scientists to discredit your facts. Governments at home and abroad are very slow to notice what you say. Slowness is the best you can hope for, outright hostility and muddling methods are more usual. The earth is being murdered and hardly anybody wants to believe it.

'Why don't you work for ICI?' my father said. They've got a share-option scheme.'

Yes, why don't I, or Shell, or Esso, or Union Carbide, or NASA?

Why don't I take the share option and the company car and the pension scheme and the private health care and the reassuring salary? Why am I camping by a river and going mad? My skin is flaking off.

I have been alone for a long time, days and nights of time, so that time is no longer measured in the units I am used to but has mutinied and run wild. I do not measure time now, time measures me.

This is frightening.

Very often I sleep all day and stay awake all night-why should I not, since there is no one to mind?

I have a calendar and a watch, and so rationally I can tell where I am in this thing called a year. My own experience is different. I feel as though I have been here for years already. I could be talked out of that but I couldn't be persuaded not to feel it any more. How do you persuade someone not to feel? And so my strongest instinct is to abandon the common-sense approach and accept what is actually happening to me; that time has slowed down.

Why not? Under certain conditions our pulses slow or race, our breathing alters, the whole body will change its habit if necessary.

There are so many fairy stories about someone who falls asleep for a little while and wakes up to find himself in a different time. Outwardly nothing is changing for me, but inwardly I am not always here, sitting by a rotting river. I can still escape.

Escape from what? The present? Yes, from this foreground that blinds me to whatever may be happening in the distance. If I have a spirit, a soul, any name will do, then it won't be single, it will be multiple. Its dimension will not be one of confinement but one of space. It may inhabit numerous changing decaying bodies in the future and in the past.

I can't know this. I am only looking for a theory to fit the facts. That's what scientists do, though you may feel I am too far-fetched.

Perhaps I am.

Poisoned or not, the mercury has made me think like this. Drop it and it shivers in clones of itself all over the floor, but you can scoop it up again and there won't be any seams or shatter marks. It's one life or countless lives depending on what you want.

What do I want?

When I'm dreaming I want a home and a lover and some children, but it won't work. Who'd want to live with a monster? I may not look like a monster any more but I couldn't hide it for long. I'd break out, splitting my dress, throwing the dishes at the milkman if he leered at me and said, 'Hello, darling.' The truth is I've lost patience with this hypocritical stinking world. I can't take it any more. I can't flatter, lie, cajole or even smile very much. What is there to smile about?

'You don't try,' my mother said. 'It's not so bad.'

It is so bad.

'You're pretty,' said my father, 'any man would want to marry you.'

Not if he pulled back my eyelids, not if he peeped into my ears, not if he looked down my throat with a torch, not if he listened to my heartbeat with a stethoscope. He'd run out of the room holding his head. He'd see her, the other one, lurking inside. She fits, even though she's so big.

I had sex with a man once: in out in out. A soundtrack of grunts and a big sigh at the end.

He said, 'Did you come?'

Of course I didn't come, haven't you read Master's and Johnson?

And then he fell asleep and his breathing was in out in out.

Later I said, Td like to swallow you.'

'Adventurous, eh?' he said.

Whole, I meant, every single bit, straight down the throat like an oyster, your feet last, your feet waving in my mouth like a diver's flippers. Jonah and the Whale.

I don't hate men, I just wish they'd try harder. They all want to be heroes and all we want is for them to stay at home and help with the housework and the kids. That's not the kind of heroism they enjoy.

'You're so negative,' said my mother.

No I'm not, you are. You're the one who sits and watches the news and eats your factory-farmed meat and your battery eggs and chucks your endless stream of plastic into gouged out craters in the countryside. Where do you think all that rubbish goes?

I don't know if other worlds exist in space or time. Perhaps this is the only one and the rest is rich imaginings. Either way it doesn't matter. We have to protect both possibilities. They seem to be interdependent.

I have a memory of a time when I was a schoolgirl and getting fatter by the day. At that time we lived in a council flat on Upper Thames Street in London, by the river. Later we had our own home, but we were poor and working-class then. My mother forgets this was ever so. I was walking home from school by myself. I walked along the Embankment and watched the boats going up and down. There was a Punch and Judy ship and Mr Punch was bashing the baby and Judy was trying to strangle him and there was Toby the dog in his white ruff.

I didn't want to go home. I wanted to stay out all night and make a bed by the river and light a fire. I climbed up the steps at Waterloo Bridge and ignored the racing traffic so that I could look out on either side at St Paul's and Westminster. It wasn't easy: everyone wanted to get home, the view didn't matter. It was autumn and so the sun was setting early and the air was sharp. I liked it hurting my nostrils and making patterns when I blew out. I watched the sun sliding behind the buildings, and as I concentrated the screeching cars and the thudding people and the smells of rubber and exhaust receded. I felt I was alone on a different afternoon.

I looked at my forearms resting on the wall. They were massive, like thighs, but there was no wall, just a wooden spit, and when I turned in the opposite direction I couldn't see the dome of St Paul's.

I could see rickety vegetable boats and women arguing with one another and a regiment on horseback crossing the Thames.

I had to get on to Blackfriars, there was someone waiting for me.

Who? Who?

Now I wake up in the night shouting 'Who? Who?' like an owl.

Why does that day return and return as I sit by a rotting river with only the fire for company?

Morning. Out at sea the ship held at anchor. Jordan's rowing boat pulled high on the beach. The fire is smoking, it must be blazing when he wakes. In Hell the fires will blaze eternally, there'll be no scouring the sands for driftwood.

When Jordan stirs I've already collected a great pile of salvage and I am opening oysters with my little knife - a fine knife with an ebony handle got from a dead Sir Somebody who happened to be a Puritan. That was before I reformed myself. After the untimely end of Preacher Scroggs and Neighbour Firebrace I vowed to live quietly again and restrain my natural capacity for murder. I do not think of myself as a criminal, and indeed would protest any attempt to confine me in Newgate. My actions are not motivated by thought of gain, only by thought of justice, and I have searched my soul to conclude that there is no person dead at my hand who would be better off alive. As evidence, if any need evidence, I will cite the good wife of Preacher Scroggs, she whose only pleasure had been his member poking through a sheet. When she heard of the death of her husband (I was too ladylike to describe the circumstances themselves) she raised her hands to Heaven and thanked God for his mercy. Such is my humility that I bore no resentment at this mistaken gratitude towards Our Saviour. I wanted no thanks myself, and Our Lord is often robbed of His due. She packed up her things straight away and went to live with her unmarried sister in the town of Tunbridge Wells. I watched her go with tears in my eyes to think what she had suffered and from what horrors she had been released.

And if on Judgement Day it proves I have made a mistake once or a second time, I know Our Lord will wrap me to him as he did the woman taken in adultery and ask, 'Who will cast the first stone?'

When Jordan and myself had each swallowed thirty-six oysters he told me he must leave for London immediately to present the King with his rarest find.

'I have it here,' he said, 'in this bag, but before long it will perish.'

'Not gold, then?' I said, disappointed.

He laughed and assured me there was gold enough on the ship.

'Show me your wonder,' I said.

He unwrapped his bag as tenderly as I had unwrapped him on that first day in the broth-coloured Thames.

'I think it is another fruit,' I said, when I looked on its hide like that of a reptile and its spiky green crown of the kind that would grace an imp in Hell.

'Another fruit?' He seemed puzzled. I told him of our trip to visit the first banana and what a shock it had been in both shape and colour.

'Since that day,' said I, 'there's no fruit or vegetable can unsettle me.'

'I remember that day,' he said.

Then he jumped up and began to collect his things together.

'We will engage horses in the town.'

'And what horse will carry me?'

After some argument it was agreed that we should go to the expense of a carriage. It is my custom to walk everywhere, but as the mother of a hero come home I deemed it undignified to limp into London two days after my son and carrying my own baggage.

'Is your necklace also a precious thing?' I said, feigning only a small interest. He looked at me sharply and stopped his bustling.

'It was given to me by a woman who does not exist. Her name is Fortunata.'

'I knew an Italian pirate of that name once,' I said.

Jordan was staring out to sea. 'It was a day like this she described, when she told me the story of Artemis and why she was in her service.'

'Tell it to me,' I said. 'It is only just light.'

The goddess Artemis begged of her father, King Zeus, a bow and arrows, a short tunic and an island of her own free from interference. She didn't want to get married, she didn't want to have children. She wanted to hunt. Hunting did her good.

By morning she had packed and set off for a new life in the woods. Soon her fame spread and other women joined her, but Artemis didn't care for company. She wanted to be alone. In her solitude she discovered something very odd. She had envied men their long-legged freedom to roam the world and return full of glory to wives who only waited. She knew about the heroes and the home-makers, the great division that made life possible. Without rejecting it she had simply hoped to take on the freedoms of the other side, but what if she travelled the world and the seven seas like a hero? Would she find something different or the old things in different disguises?

The alchemists have a saying,
'Tertium non data':
the third is not given. That is, the transformation from one element to another, from waste matter into best gold, is a process that cannot be documented. It is fully mysterious. No one really knows what effects the change. And so it is with the mind that moves from its prison to a vast plain without any movement at all. We can only guess at what happened.