The World and Other Places: Stories

by Jeanette Winterson

  The people of Aeros use their island like a magic carpet, propelling it first here, then there, packing up at a moment’s notice, disappearing with quicksilver grace. To their credit, they usually leave a note pinned in mid-air.

  To find the island it is necessary to travel by plane, balloon, or to carry an extension ladder. The island hovers. Many a person has discovered it, only to find that it remains out of reach.

  The four winds home here. The mountain air of the region develops the lungs of the inhabitants, who are known for singing, juggling, making musical instruments, and building elaborate windmills to tilt at. This is a talkative island, and when they are not talking to each other, the inhabitants shout encouragement at the other islands, as Aeros flies by.

  The constant movement of the place is such that solider travellers complain a rough sea is stiller.

  The people of Aeros are great story-tellers. Even the simplest action is bound into a story. It is common for a queue of people, waiting for a cable car, to become so much part of the story they are hearing, that they transform themselves into it. Only last week, a dozen listeners, intent on the story of ‘How the Genie was trapped in the Copper Vase,’ forgot their own lives entirely. Six of them became the genie, and sat wrapped up, as if in a vase, while half a dozen became the market stall holder who bought the copper vase by mistake.

  The city rerouted the cable car stop, and the story-teller was left to run through the streets, bringing the families of the transformed to join their new lives.

  No one worries. Sooner or later, another story, more powerful than the last, will free them; free them into other selves or back into their own.

  And this is part of the mystery.

  As one travels through the island, street by street, mountain by mountain, story by story, it is the stories that begin to dominate. A man sits down, cooks himself a story and eats it. A woman falls asleep on a bed of stories, a story drawn up to her chin.

  Deeper into the island, where the cable cars stop and where the nimble ponies are left far behind, the only way for anyone to travel is by story.

  Some stories go farther than others. Some take the traveller as far as the line of mountains bordering a vast forest. At this place, lonely and silent, the story falters. The traveller turns to look back at the distance and while he or she is busy with other thoughts, the stories disappear into the forest from where they came.

  It is well known that all the stories in the world come from this dense dark forest, come out of the regions of silence into the government of the tongue. Anyone who sits for long enough and narrows his eyes on the strip of forest he can penetrate will see strange shapes moving in the half-light. Is that Hercules in a lion skin? Is that Icarus waxed into golden wings? Is that Siegfried’s horn in the distance? Is that Lancelot’s horse?

  The traveller is tired now, and thinks he sees dwarves carrying iron hammers, and the old witch Baba Yaga stirring at her brew. He seems to hear the fi, fie, fo of the giants, and to smell trolls coming home though the wood.

  The wind is up, carrying the Snow Queen across the frozen stars, the red sun sinks beyond the trees.

  The traveller reaches out a hand to catch the sun and catches a chestnut. The case has split and the nut is smooth and burnished, giving out a faint light. He puts it in his pocket. She puts it in her pocket. They walk down into the closure of the forest, until they too become part of the story.

  Newton

  This is the story of Tom.

  This is the story of Tom and his neighbours.

  This is the story of Tom and his neighbours and his neighbour’s garden.

  This is the story of Tom.

  ‘All of my neighbours are Classical Physicists,’ said Tom. ‘Their laws of motion are determined. They rise at 7 a.m. and leave for work at 8 a.m. The women take coffee at 10 a.m. If you see a body on the street between I and 2 p.m. lunchtime, it can only be the doctor, it can only be the undertaker, it can only be the stranger.

  ‘I am the stranger,’ said Tom.

  ‘What is the First Law of Thermodynamics?’ said Tom.

  ‘You can’t transfer heat from a colder to a hotter. I’ve never known any warmth from my neighbours so I would reckon this is true. Here in Newton we don’t talk much. That is, my neighbours talk all the time, they swap gossip, but I never have any, although sometimes I am some.’

  ‘What is the Second Law of Thermodynamics?’ said Tom.

  ‘Everything tends towards the condition of entropy. That is, the energy is still there somewhere but for all useful purposes it is lost. Take a look at my neighbours here in Newton and you’ll see what it means.’

  My neighbour has a garden full of plastic flowers. ‘It’s easy,’ she says, ‘and so nice.’ When her husband died she had him laminated, and he stands outside now, hands on his hips, carefully watching the sky.

  ‘What’s the matter Tom?’ she says, her head bobbing along the fence like a duck in a shooting parlour.

  ‘Why don’t you get married? In my day nobody had any trouble finding someone. We just did it and made the best of it. There were no screwballs then.’

  ‘What none?’

  She bobbed faster and faster, gathering a bosom-load of underwear from the washing line. I knew she wanted me to stare at it, she wants to prove that I am a screwball. After all, if it’s me, it’s not her, it’s not the others. You can’t have more than one per block.

  She wheeled round, ready to bob back up the other way, knickers popping from every pore.

  ‘Tom, we were glad to be normal. In those days it was something good, something to be proud of.’

  Tom the screwball. Here I am with my paperback foreign editions and my corduroy trousers (‘You got something against Levi’s?’ he asked me, before he was laminated). All the men round here wear Levi’s, denims or chinos. The only stylistic difference is whether they pack their stomach inside or outside the waistband.

  They suspect me of being a homosexual. I wouldn’t care. I wouldn’t care what I was if only I were something.

  ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ said my mother, a long time ago, many times a long time ago.

  ‘A fireman, an astronaut, a spy, a train driver, a hard hat, an inventor, a deep sea diver, a doctor and a nurse.’

  ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ I ask myself in the mirror most days.

  ‘Myself. I want to be myself.’

  And who is that, Tom?

  Into the clockwork universe the quantum child. Why doesn’t every mother believe her child can change the world? The child can. This is the joke. Here we are still looking for a saviour and hundreds are being born every second. Look at it, this tiny capsule of new life, indifferent to your prejudices, your miseries, unmindful of the world already made. Make it again? They could if we let them, but we make sure they grow up just like us, fearful like us. Don’t let them know the potential that they are. Don’t let them hear the grass singing. Let them live and die in Newton, tick-tock, the last breath.

  There was a knock at my door, I hid my Camus in the fridge and peered through the frosted glass. Of course I can’t see anything. They never remind you of that when you fit frosted glass.

  ‘Tom? Tom?’ RAP RAP.

  It’s my neighbour. I shuffled to the door, feet bare, shirt loose. There she is, her hair coiled on her head like a wreath on a war memorial. She was dressed solely in pink.

  ‘I’m not interrupting am I Tom?’ she said, her eyes shoving past me into the kitchen.

  ‘I was reading.’

  ‘That’s what I thought. I said to myself, poor Tom will be reading. He won’t be busy. I’ll ask him to help me out. You know how difficult it is for a woman to manage alone. Since my husband was laminated, I haven’t had it easy, Tom.’

  She smelled of woman; warm, perfumed, slightly threatening. I had to be careful not to act like a screwball. I offered her coffee. She seemed pleased, although she kept glancing at my bare feet and loose shirt. Never mind
, she needs me to help her with something in the house. That’s normal, that’s nice, I want to be normal and nice.

  ‘My mother’s here. Will you help me get her into the house.’

  ‘Now? Shall we go now?’

  ‘She’s had a long journey. She can rest in the truck a while. Shall we have that coffee you offered me first?’

  I don’t love my neighbour but still my hand trembled over the sugar spoon. They’ve made me feel odd and outside for so long, that now even the simplest things feel strange.

  How does a normal person make coffee? What is it about me that worries them so much? I’m clean. I have a job.

  ‘Tom, tell me, is it the modern thing to keep books in the refrigerator?’

  In cheap crime novels, you often read the line, ‘He spun round.’ It makes me laugh to imagine a human being so animated, but when she asked me that question, I spun. One second I was facing the sink, the next second I was facing her, and she was facing me, holding my copy of Camus.

  ‘I was just fetching out the milk Tom. Who is Albert K Mew?’ She pronounced it like an enraged cat.

  ‘He’s a Frenchman. A French writer. I don’t know how he came to be in the fridge.’

  She repeated my words slowly as though I had just offered her a universal truth.

  ‘You don’t know how he came to be in the fridge?’ I shrugged and smiled and tried to disarm her.

  ‘It’s a big fridge. Don’t you ever find things in the fridge you had forgotten about?’

  ‘No Tom. Never. I store cheese at the top, and then beer and bacon underneath, and underneath those I keep my weekend chicken, and at the bottom I have salad things and eggs. Those are the rules. It was the same when my husband was alive and it is the same now.’

  I was beginning to regard her with a new respect. The Grim Reaper came to call. He took her husband from the bed but left the weekend chicken on the shelf.

  O Death, where is thy sting?

  My neighbour, still holding my Camus, leaned forward confidentially, her arms resting on the table. She looked intimate, soft, I could see the beginning of her breasts.

  ‘Tom, have you ever wondered whether you need help?’ She said HELP with four capital letters, like a doorstep evangelist.

  ‘If you mean the fridge, anyone can make a mistake.’ She leaned forward a little further. More breast.

  ‘Tom, I’m going to be tough with you. You know what your problem is? You read too many geniuses. I don’t know if Mr K Mew is a genius but the other day you were seen in the main square reading Picasso’s notebooks. Children were coming out of school and you were reading Picasso. Miss Fin at the library tells me that all you ever borrow are works of genius. She has no record of you ever ordering a sea story. Now that’s unhealthy. Why is it unhealthy? You yourself are not a genius, if you were we would have found out by now. You are ordinary like the rest of us and ordinary people should lead ordinary lives. Like the rest of us, here in Tranquil Gardens.’

  She leaned back, her bosom with her.

  ‘Shall we go and help your mother?’ I said.

  Outside, my neighbour walked towards a closed van parked in front of her house. I’d seen her mother a couple of years previously but I couldn’t see her now.

  ‘She’s in the back Tom. Go round the back.’

  My neighbour flung open the back doors of the hired van and certainly there was her mother, sitting upright in the wheel-chair that had been her home and her car. She was smiling a fearful plasticy smile, her teeth as perfect as a cheetah’s.

  ‘Haven’t they done a wonderful job Tom? She’s even better than Doug, and he was pretty advanced at the time. I wish she could see herself. She never guessed I’d laminate her. She’d be so proud.’

  ‘Are those her own teeth?’

  ‘They are now Tom.’

  ‘Where will you put her?’

  ‘In the garden with the flowers. She loved flowers.’

  Slowly, slowly, we heaved down mother. We wheeled her over the swept pavement to the whitewashed house. It was afternoon coffee time and a lot of neighbours had been invited to pay their respects. They were so respectful that we were outside talking plastic until the men came home. My neighbour gets an incentive voucher for every successful lamination she introduces. She reckons that if Newton will only do it her way, she’ll have 75 percent of her own lamination costs paid by the time she dies.

  ‘I’ve seen you hanging around the cemetery Tom. It’s not hygienic.’

  What does she think I am? A ghoul? I’ve told her before that my mother is buried there but she just shakes her head and tells me that young couples need the land.

  ‘Until we learn to stop dying Tom, we have to live with the consequences. There’s no room for the dead unless you treat them as ornamental.’

  I have tried to tell her that if we stop dying, all the cemeteries in the world can never release enough land for the bulging, ageing population. She doesn’t listen, she just looks dreamy and thinks about the married couples.

  Newton is jammed with married couples. We need one-way streets to let the singles through. I hate going shopping in Newton. I hate clubbing my way through the crocodile files, two by two in Main street, as though the ark has landed. Complacent shoulder blades, battered baby buggys. DIY stores crammed with HIM and shopping malls heaving with HER. Don’t they know that too much role playing is bad for the health? Imagine being a wife and saying ‘Honey, have you got time to fix the toilet?’ Imagine being a husband and figuring out how to clean the toilet when she’s left you.

  Why are they married? It’s normal, it’s nice. They do it the way they do everything else in Newton. Tick-tock says the clock.

  ‘Tom, thank you Tom,’ she cooed at me when her mother was safely settled beside the duck pond. The ducks are bath-time yellow with chirpy red beaks and their pond has real water with a bit of chlorine in it just in case. I had never been in my neighbour’s garden before. It was quiet. No rustling in the undergrowth. No undergrowth to rustle in. No birds yammering. She tells me that peace is what the countryside is all about.

  ‘If you were a genius Tom you could work here. The silence. The air. I have a unit you know, filters the air as it enters the garden.’

  It was autumn and there were a few plastic leaves scattered about on the AstroTurf. At the bottom of the garden, my neighbour has a shed, made of imitation wood, where she keeps her stocks for the changing of the seasons. She has told me many times that a garden must have variety and in her ventilated Aladdin’s cave are the reassuring copies of nature. Tulips, red and white, hang meekly upside down by their stems. Daffodils in bright bunches are jumbled with loose camellia blooms, waiting to be slotted into the everlasting tree. She even has a row of squirrels clutching identical nuts.

  ‘Those are going out soon, along with the autumn creeper.’ She has Virginia Creeper cascading down the house. It’s still green. This is the burnt and blazing version.

  ‘Mine’s turning already,’ I said.

  ‘Too early,’ she said. ‘You can’t depend on nature. I don’t like leaves falling. They don’t fall where they should. If you don’t regulate nature, why, she’ll just go ahead and do what she likes. We have to regulate her. If we don’t, it’s volcanoes and forest fires and floods and death and bodies scattered everywhere, just like leaves.’

  Like leaves. Just like leaves. Don’t you like them just a little where they fall? Don’t you turn them over to see what is written on the other side? I like that. I like the simple text that can be read or not, that lies beneath your feet and mine, read or not. That falls, rain and wind, though nobody scoops it up to take it home. Life fell at your feet and you kicked her away and she bled on your shoes and when you came home, your mother said, ‘Look at you, covered in leaves.’

  You were covered in leaves. You peeled them off one by one, exposing the raw skin beneath. All those leavings. And when what had to fall was fallen, you picked it up and read what was written on the other side. It made no sen
se to you. You screwed it up in your pocket where it burned like a live coal. Tell me why they left you, one by one, the ones you loved? Didn’t they like you? Didn’t they, like you, need a heart that was a book with no last page? Turn the leaves.

  ‘The leaves are turning,’ said Tom.

  She asked me back to supper as a thank you, and I thought I should go because that’s what normal people do; eat with their neighbours, even though it is boring and the food is horrible. I searched for a tie and wore it.

  ‘Tom, come in, what a lovely surprise!’

  She must mean what a lovely surprise for me. It can hardly be a surprise for her, she’s been cooking all afternoon.

  Once inside the dining room, I know she means me. I know that because the entire population of Newton is already seated at the dinner table, a table that begins crammed up against the display cabinet of Capodimonte and extends … and extends … through a jagged hole blown in the side of the house, out and on towards the bus station.

  ‘I think you know everyone Tom,’ says my neighbour. ‘Sit here, by me, in Doug’s place. You’re about his height.’ Do I know everyone? It’s hard to say, since beyond the hole, all is lost.

  ‘Tom, take a plate. We’re having chicken cooked in bacon strips and stuffed with hard-boiled eggs. There’s a salad I made and plenty of cheese and beer in the fridge if you want it.’

  She drifted away from me, her dress clinging to her like a drowned man. Nobody looked up from their plates. They were eating chicken, denims and chinos all, eating the three or four hundred fowl laid on the table, half a dozen eggs per ass. I was still trying to work out the roasting details, the oven size, when BAM, one of the chickens exploded, pelting my neighbour with eggs like hand-grenades. One of her arms flew off but luckily for her, not the one she needed for her fork. Nobody noticed. I wanted to speak, I wanted to act, I began to speak, to act, just as my neighbour herself returned carrying a covered silver dish.