Sexing the Cherry (7 page)

'But he never touched me. It was a boy he loved. I pierced them with a single arrow where they lay.

'I still think it was poetic.'

My husband married me so that his liaisons with other "omen, being forbidden, would be more exciting. Danger as an aphrodisiac to him: he wanted nothing easy or gentle. His way was to cause whirlwinds. I was warned, we always are, by well-wishers or malcontents, but I chose to take no interest in gossip. My husband was handsome and clever. What did it matter if he needed a certain kind of outlet, so long as he loved me? I wanted to love him; I was determined to be happy with him. I had not been happy before.

At first I hardly minded his weeks away. I did not realize that part of his sport was to make me mad. Only then, when he had hurt me, could he fully enjoy the other beds he visited.

I soon discovered that the women he preferred were the inmates of a lunatic asylum. With them he arranged mock marriages in deserted barns. They wore a shroud as their wedding dress and carried a bunch of carrots as a bouquet. He had them straight after on a pig-trough altar. Most were virgins. He liked to come home to me smelling of their blood.

Does the body hate itself so much that it seeks release at any cost?

I didn't kill him. I left him to walk the battlements of his mined kingdom; his body was raddled with disease. The same winter he was found dead in the snow.

Why could he not turn his life towards me, as trees though troubled by the wind yet continue in the path of the sun?

You may have heard of Rapunzel.

Against the wishes of her family, who can best be described by their passion for collecting miniature dolls, she went to live in a tower with an older woman.

Her family were so incensed by her refusal to marry the prince next door that they vilified the couple, calling one a witch and the other a little girl. Not content with names, they ceaselessly tried to break into the tower, so much so that the happy pah-had to seal up any entrance that was not on a level with the sky. The lover got in by climbing up RapunzeFs hair, and Rapunzel got in by nailing a wig to the floor and shinning up the tresses flung out of the window. Both of them could have used a ladder, but they were in love.

One day the prince, who had always liked to borrow his mother's frocks, dressed up as Rapunzel's lover and dragged himself into the tower. Once inside he tied her up and waited for the wicked witch to arrive. The moment she leaped through the window, bringing their dinner for the evening, the prince hit her over the head and threw her out again. Then he carried Rapunzel down the rope he had brought with him and forced her to watch while he blinded her broken lover in a field of thorns.

After that they lived happily ever after, of course.

As for me, my body healed, though my eyes never did, and eventually I was found by my sisters, who had come in their various ways to live on this estate.

My own husband?

Oh well, the first time I kissed him he turned into a frog.

There he is, just by your foot. His name's Anton.

On New Year's Day, walking through the deep lanes slatted with light, I saw my husband on horseback, wearing his
pink coat. He held his hunting horn to his lips and stood in the stirrups. The hunt rode off; soon they were only as big as holly berries hidden in the green.

I walked on, away from the path, through bushes and brambles, frightening partridges and threading a route between the patient cattle whose hooves in the mud were braceleted with beads of water. My boots were thick with mud. Every step was harder and harder to take. Soon I was lifting my feet as you would to climb a ladder. I was angry and sweating. I wanted to get home but I couldn't hurry. I had to get home to fetch the punch into the great hall and fire it with bright blue flames.

Coming with much difficulty to the top of a hill I looked across the widening valley and saw where the snow still patched the fields like sheets left out to dry. I love the thorn hedges and the trees bare overnight as though some child had stubbornly collected all the leaves, refusing to leave even one for a rival.

I saw my own house, its chimneys smoking, its windows orange.

Another year.

Then a stag and five deer came out of the wood and across the fields in front of my eyes. The fields were fenced and the stag jumped over, turning his head to bring the others. Just for a second he remained in the air, but in that second of flight I remembered my past, when I had been free to fly, long ago, before this gracious landing and a houseful of things.

He disappeared into the dark and I turned my back on the house. The last thing I heard was the sound of the hunt clattering into the courtyard.

I never wanted anyone but her. I wanted to run my finger from the cleft in her chin down the slope of her breasts and across the level plains of her stomach to where I knew she would be wet. I wanted to turn her over and ski the flats of my hands down the slope of her back. I wanted to pioneer the secret passage of her arse.

When she lay down I massaged her feet with mint oil and cut her toenails with silver scissors. I coiled her hair into living snakes and polished her teeth with my saliva.

I pierced her ears and filled them with diamonds. I dropped belladonna into her eyes.

When she was sick I wiped her fever with my own towels and when she cried I kept her tears in a Ming vase.

There was no separation between us. We rose in the morning and slept at night as twins do. We had four arms and four legs, and in the afternoons, when we read in the cool orchard, we did so sitting back to back.

I liked to feel the snake of her spine.

We kissed often, our mouths filling up with tongue and teeth and spit and blood where I bit her lower lip, and with my hands I held her against my hip bone.

We made love often, especially in the afternoons with the blinds half pulled and the cold flag floor against our bodies.

For eighteen years we lived alone in a windy castle and saw no one but each other. Then someone found us and then it was too late.

The man I had married was a woman. They came to burn her. I killed her with a single blow to the head before they reached the gates, and fled that place, and am come here now.

I still have a coil of her hair.

We had been married a few years when a man came to the door selling brushes. My husband was at work so I let the man into our kitchen and gave him something to eat. I asked him to show me his bag and he spread out, as you would imagine, a layer of polishing cloths, a pile of round soaps, combs for the hair, combs for the beard of a billy goat, ordinary household things. I bought one or two useful pieces, then I asked him what he had in his other bag, the one he hadn't opened.

'What was it you wanted?' he asked.

'Poison...'

'Yes, for the rats.'

'No, for my husband.'

He seemed unsurprised by my intention to murder and opened the other bag. I looked inside. It was full of little jars and sealed bags.

'Is your husband a big man?'

'Very. He is very, very fat. He is the fattest man in the village.

He has always been fat. He has eleven brothers, all of whom are as slender as spring com. Every day he eats one cow followed by one pig.'

'You are right to kill him,' said the man. 'Put this in his milk at bedtime.'

Bedtime came and I stirred my husband's vat of milk and put in the powder as directed. My husband came crashing over to the stove and gulped the milk in one draught. As soon as he had finished he began to swell up. He swelled out of the house, cracking the roof, and within a few moments had exploded. Out of his belly came a herd of cattle and a fleet of pigs, all blinking in the light and covered in milk.

He had always complained about his digestion.

I rounded them up and set off to find my sisters. I prefer farming to cookery.

He called me Jess because that is the name of the hood which restrains the falcon.

I was his falcon. I hung on his arm and fed at his hand. said my nose was sharp and cruel and that my eyes had He said my nose was sharp and cruel and that my eyes had madness in them. He said I would tear him to pieces if he dealt softly with me.

At night, if he was away, he had me chained to our bed. It was a long chain, long enough for me to use the chamber pot or to stand at the window and wait for the late owls. I love to hear the owls. I love to see the sudden glide of wings spread out for prey, and then the dip and the noise like a lover in pain.