Sexing the Cherry (19 page)

'Typical of you to make a career in the Navy after the Falklands crisis.'

I read the article. Surely this woman was a hero? Heroes give up what's comfortable in order to protect what they believe in or to live dangerously for the common good. She was doing that, so why was she being persecuted? The article said her tent had been mysteriously fired at on a number of occasions. I tried to understand her through her photograph. She was pretty; I felt I knew her, though this was not possible. Before I realized it I stood up and took down my kit bag.

I would find her.

God's judgement on the murder of the King has befallen us. London is consumed by the Plague. The city is thick with the dead. There are bodies in every house and in a street south of here the only bodies are dead ones. The houses are deserted, their shutters banging open in the night.

I took some soup to an ailing friend of mine, and as I kicked on the door to open it I saw the cart making its way slowly down the street, filling with corpses as it went. The men who pushed it were convicts. If they survived their daily labour they would be granted their freedom at the end of one month. Newgate was emptying but no criminals roared in their new-found liberty.

The men were bent double, the street was rutted and potholed and as the cart became heavier they could hardly move it. They were thin and ragged themselves, and one had the greenish hue that is the sure sign of rot.

I put down my soup and made to help them. I have no fear of the Plague. My body is too big for sour sickness to defeat it, and if it is a judgement on us all then surely I am the last to be judged?

I went in every house and pulled out bodies stiff with death. Most were wrapped in filthy blankets but some were still on their knees in the attitude of prayer. A grisly sight they looked, propped up in the cart, hands together.

At my friend's house I went inside with the soup, expecting to find her as I had left her, weak but tolerable. She was dead.

The carters were so exhausted by this time that we sat together round her table and ate the soup.

'Where are you taking the bodies?' I asked.

'To be burned,' they said. There is no way but burning. The grave-diggers have no strength left, there are too many for them. Only the moneyed may be buried. For us it is the pit.'

I went with them to the pit, carrying my friend over my shoulder. I wanted her going to be more dignified than it could have been in the cart. The closer we got, the more terrible became the smell. Dark smoke curled from a crater of the kind that must be on the moon. Around the edges of the pit were numerous carts which were tipped in from time to time. As soon as they were empty the miserable carters trundled away with them back to the foul streets.

Holding my nose with one hand, and keeping my friend secure with the other, I went and looked in. It was very deep, and criss-crossed with huge pieces of wood, full trees here and there. In between, and sometimes caught in the branches, were the legs and arms and heads of the dead.

'It is a vision of Hell ,'I said.

There was a man next to me who had some charge over the matter.

'It is Hell indeed, and this is work for imps. I must keep the fire burning to purify the rot of the bodies. Should it smoulder, myself and my men must take that cut stairway you see to the side and invigorate the flames with bellows. We have levelled a ridge round the inside of the crater to stand on. In this way we are able to walk fully round it and if necessary prod in any who are too close to the air.'

'I have brought my friend,' I said.

Then you must cast her in and not look back.'

'I will carry her down. It is an indignity to be tossed aside.'

He tried to dissuade me, on account of the prodigious heat, but I made my way down step by step, my eyes running at the smoke and the fumes. When I reached the ledge I walked round until I saw a calm and pleasant branch not yet suffused in fire. Leaning, I laid her on it and made my ascent. The grim workers looked at me silently and turned back to their dreadful task.

When I got home Jordan was lying on his bed delirious with fever. He could hardly speak to me, and when he did his talk was of wild places and strange customs, and over and over again he repeated, 'Fortunata, Fortunata.'

I am a resourceful woman and believe I can do almost anything if it falls within the mortal realm, but I could not find a woman who did not exist.

In despair I went to the dog kennel and shook it with both hands until my neighbour poked her head out, cursing such oaths as should never be heard in female company.

'You must pay me my due for kindness,' I said. 'My boy is dying. He must live.'

She started her cackling and muttering and nonsense about those who must accept the will of God, and was making to go back in when I snatched her by the waist and held her up over my head.

'Make him well,' I said, as politely as I could, 'otherwise I may not say what maternal rage might do.'

I put her down and went inside to bathe Jordan's head and feed him oranges. He could have been a lord had he wished it. The King wanted to heap honours on him and would have equipped him with any ship to sail the seas. But Jordan would not. He said he wanted to sit by the river and watch the boats. There were looks then; they could not understand him, and some whispered that he had gone mad in his thirteen years away. Others said his heart was broken. I listened and took not too much notice, for will not people always say something hi preference to keeping quiet?

At night-time she came in with an evil-smelling pan of fluid and set it on the hearth.

'Let him drink it, bathe in it and sleep within sight of it,' was all she said, and then she scuttled back to her bed of bones. I heard her crunching in the dark.

We did as she demanded, and after a few days Jordan's fever abated and he was well enough to eat a chop.

'We should thank her,' he said, and took her a ruby. She held it to the light and squinted at it, then, satisfied it was genuine, she exclaimed on its good properties for the blood and ate it. Jordan and myself were very much taken aback but we went inside without a word.

When the Plague was over, in 1665, London was a quieter place and there were plenty of houses to be had. I approved of being able to go to market without having to fight through a Godless stream of foolish persons. But a strange sickness had come over me, not of the body, but of the mind. I fancied that I still smelt the stench wherever I went. I couldn't rid my nostrils of the odour of death. I began to think of London as a place full of filth and pestilence that would never be clean.

'God's revenge is still upon us,' I said to Jordan. 'We are corrupt and our city is corrupted. There is no whole or beautiful thing left...'

Then Jordan announced, suddenly and without warning, that he was intending to put to sea again and had prepared a vessel at Deptford.

'Will you go at once?' I asked, full of fear.

'Not at once, but when I must go I shall be ready.'

Hearing this I set out around the streets, walking for comfort, but wherever I walked carried the same message. That this rot would not be purged. And I thought of the fire in the pit and of all the bodies whose ashes at least were clean.

This city should be burned down,' I whispered to myself. 'It should burn and burn until there is nothing left but the cooling wind.'

'My name is Nicolas Jordan,' I said.

We ate supper from her campfire: baked potatoes and beans and tin mugs of tea. She didn't want to talk much so we sat back to back watching the stars.

The river's glowing,' I said.

'It's phosphorus, the tests are conclusive.'

'It reminds me of
The Ancient Mariner,
the slimy sea.'

She had a rowing boat tied to a tree, and we took it out and floated on the eery water, the orange of the campfire burning in the distance. I wanted to thank her for trying to save us, for trying to save me, because it felt that personal, though I don't know why. But when I tried to speak my throat was clogged with feelings that resist words. There's a painting I love called
The Sower,
by Van Gogh. A peasant walks home at evening with a huge yellow moon behind him. The land is strong and certain, made of thick colours laid on with a palette knife. It comforts me because it makes me think that the world will always be here, strong and certain, at the end of a day, at the end of a journey. Brown fields and a yellow moon.

'Let's burn it,' she said. 'Let's burn down the factory.'

On September the second, in the year of Our Lord, sixteen hundred and sixty-six, a fire broke out in a baker's yard in Pudding Lane. The flames were as high as a man, and quickly spread to the next house and the next. I had been drinking with my friends the bakers all night, or, rather, they had been drinking and it was fortunate for them that I was able to pull their bodies to a safe place. I did not start the fire - how could I, having resolved to lead a blameless life? - but I did not stop it. Indeed the act of pouring a vat of oil on to the flames may well have been said to encourage it. But it was a sign, a sign that our great sin would finally be burned away. I could not have hindered the work of God.

I ran home and awaited news. The fire was moving westwards. A day later it seemed the whole of London was burning.

'Hurry, Jordan,' I said, *we have done with this time and place.'

We packed our things and left for his ship. I would gladly have taken the dog kennel and its occupant, but she would not come. We made her a raft from a chicken crate and left her staring at the smoke-filled sky.

The river was filling with people and their belongings. On Jordan's instructions I rowed down the Thames while he attended to some final arrangements. I waited for him until nightfall, and still he did not come and did not come, and then the descending fog robbed me of all view except the flames.

About half an hour after midnight I heard him come aboard. His face was pale, his hands trembled. I thought it was the devastation he had seen, but he shook his head. He was coming through London Fields when the fog covered him and, hurrying, he had fallen and banged his head. He came to, and feeling his way, arms outstretched, he had suddenly touched another face and screamed out. For a second the fog cleared and he saw that the stranger was himself.

'Perhaps I am to die,' he said, and then, while Iwas protesting this, 'Or perhaps I am to live, to be complete as she said I would be.'

'Who is this she?'

'Fortunata.'

I did not answer him, and he sprang away and cast off from the bank. The ship eased out into the darkness and in a few hours we had left behind the livid flames and the terrible sound of burning. We slid peacefully towards the sea, the wind behind us, the great sail fat. I looked at Jordan standing at the prow, his silhouette black and sharp-edged. I thought I saw someone standing beside him, a woman, slight and strong. I tried to call out but I had no voice. Then she vanished and there was nothing next to Jordan but empty space.