Sexing the Cherry

by Jeanette Winterson

  'Perhaps you should tell that to my men,' he says, and standing back with his twisted smile revealed eight sober Roundheads in their coats of no colours.

  I went to the door and saw another three surrounding Jordan as he made the bonfire.

  'Satan's league!' I shouted. 'Get thee behind me!'

  Because I am a sinner the devils did not vanish as they did for Jesus; rather they took hold of Jordan and began to march him away while Firebrace set up such a farting and laughing that I feared he would explode before I had time to dismember him.

  I ran straight at the guards, broke the arms of the first, ruptured the second and gave the third a kick in the head that knocked him out at once. The other five came at me, and when I had dispatched two for an early judgement another took his musket and fired me straight in the chest. I fell over, killing the man who was poised behind me, and plucked the musket ball out of my cleavage. I was in a rage then.

  'You are no gentleman to spoil a poor woman's dress, and my best dress at that.'

  I sat up and rolled up my sleeves, for it dawned on me that I must take these scurvy fellows seriously. But before I had managed my feet they had run away, leaving only Scroggs and Firebrace trembling the way they will on the Last Day.

  'I will not kill you now,' I said, 'for I am tired after my journey and wish only to settle in my own house. Slink away with droppings in your pants and never come here again, not even if I go away for a lifetime.'

  At my magnanimousness they were abashed, as even sinners must be in the presence of virtue. When they had gone Jordan and I piled up all the copies of'A Perfect Diurnal' and made a bonfire whose light blazed across the Thames in streaks of splendour. The very poor came and sat by it, and warmed themselves, and drank beer of mine. I fancied I had never been away and that all our adventures and troubles were a dream. I looked at Jordan and saw a little boy with a battered boat. And I thought, if only the fire could be kept burning, the future might be kept at bay and this moment would remain. This warmth, this light. But I fell asleep and woke shivering to see the early morning hanging over the water and the chars of our fire petrified with frost.

  I was drinking with Tradescant when a boy slipped into the Crown of Thorns and put a broadsheet on our table.

  The innkeeper was a Loyalist and had no truck with those po-faced, flat-buttocked zealots who had declared the King a traitor to his own people. A despot, they called him, a tyrant, a spendthrift, unwilling to accept a Parliament of the people for the people. London was awash with pamphlets telling anyone who could read them that the King had no Divine Right and should be called to justice for his sins. For myself, I would rather live with sins of excess than sins of denial.

  The Puritans, who wanted a rule of saints on earth and no king but Jesus, forgot that we are born into flesh and in flesh must remain. Their women bind their breasts and cook plain food without salt, and the men are so afraid of their member uprising that they keep it strapped between their legs with bandages.

  This week, the week before the trial, they are paying men to sit in public houses and overhear any loyalty to the King. This badly printed broadsheet with a message from the King and no publisher's name was a crime punishable by death for those who put it about. The boy had gone, seeped into the wainscot with a penny from Tradescant, and all of us who love the King crowded round to hear his words.

  Tradescant has promised us seats in the gallery at the trial. We are going in disguise, though what disguise I shall assume is not yet clear...

  There was an order in London during the week of the trial prohibiting the presence of Cavaliers, and Tradescant was in serious danger, being a chosen employee of the Royal house. Everyone anxious to attend the trial was subjected to a rigorous search and investigation, though the Puritans, concerned to uphold their public image, had promised an open trial, free to all, except supporters of the King. Tradescant and Jordan dressed themselves as drabs, with painted faces and scarlet lips and dresses that looked as though they'd been pawed over by every infantryman in the capital. Jordan had a fine mincing walk and a leer that got him a good few offers of a bed for the night.

  I swathed myself about in rags, black as pitch, and put on an old wig we begged from a theatrical. Then I made myself a specially reinforced wheelbarrow and sat in it like a heap of manure.

  In this way we made our entrance to the Cotton House and the trial of the King.

  Two soldiers stopped us and asked if we had been given passes to the gallery.

  'Oh, sir, passes we have,' I sighed, reaching into my filthy folds. 'We have been granted passes on account of our sinfulness.

  Look, they are marked by Hugh Peter himself.'

  It was true. Hugh Peter, a puce-stained pock-marked preacher who thought himself Christ's deputy, had offered passes to the gallery for any sinners who truly longed to repent and see the Rule of Saints begin. He had preached his sermon that week on the text, 'He shall bind their King in chains', and afterwards the hopeless and the damned had crept to him for solace. Jordan, in his costume as a drab, had felt Hugh Peter's oily hand slide under his skirts promising the freedom that only Christ can bring. Jordan had wept and moaned and begged two more passes for other friends of his. Common women, women in need of a pastor's touch.

  And here we were.

  The soldier squinted at the bits of paper and asked me to leave my wheelbarrow at the entrance to the gallery.

  'I cannot, sir,' I cried, 'for I have the Clap and my flesh is rotting beneath me. If I were to stand up, sir, you would see a river of pus run across these flags. The Rule of Saints cannot begin in pus.'

  Jordan and Tradescant stood behind me, each holding a handle of the wheelbarrow.

  'My daughter and my niece, sir,' I said, waving a hand. These two have pushed me from Plymouth so that I can be redeemed.'

  'We have,' said Jordan, 'every mile a torment.'

  The soldiers turned aside and conferred amongst themselves, while I sweated for fear that they would make me stand up and thus see my size. Since my battle with the guards Tradescant had told me there was a warrant for my arrest.

  'You may go in,' said one of the soldiers.

  Then, please,' said I, rolling my eyes winningly, 'please, clear a path for us, for I will have to stagger up the steps into the gallery while my daughter catches any fluids that may flow from me. It is the stench of a three days' dead dog and not for the noses of the tender.'

  I saw the soldier's lips twitch, but he said nothing and led us to the great doors leading up to the gallery. He pushed aside the queue waiting for admittance and waved us through.

  Once the doors had thudded behind us I leapt from the barrow, picked it up and ran to the top of the stairs where I immediately jumped back in and recommenced my groaning and calling out to Jesus.

  The trial lasted seven days, and it was no trial but a means to an execution. The King in his velvet hat, with no jewels about him but his Star of the Garter, bore up proudly in the face of Bradshaw, the chief prosecutor. He won sympathy even from his enemies. On Sunday, when religious folk were at church, Obadiah Sedgewick denounced the King as usual from his pulpit in Covent Garden, and met with silence.

  On the seventh day the gallery was packed with goggle-eyed ruffians all in their Puritan clothes come to hear sentence. The clerk stood up and read through all the King's misdeeds, including that of refusing to plead guilty or not guilty because he would not recognize the authority of the court. At length this stick of a man with a spotted youth's face and the balding skull of an ancient read out, solemn as he could, 'Charles Stuart, Tyrant, Traitor, Murderer and Public Enemy, you shall be put to death by the severing of your head from your body.'

  Then all the commissioners who had signed the death warrant, sixty-eight of them, stood up to signify their agreement.

  The King tried to speak, but Bradshaw would have none of it and motioned for him to be led away. The King was already dead in law, and a dead man cannot speak.

  We watched the
King leave the chamber, his back straight, his cane in his hand. At the doorway to the street he saw crowds of his followers, flouting the ban on their presence, too many for the guards to arrest but still unable to reach the courtroom. They were weeping. Charles turned to his gaolers and said, in a voice loud enough for all of us to hear, 'You may forbid their attendance, but not their tears.'

  In winter the frost at midnight brightens the ground and hardens the stars. We kept vigil all night, the three of us, huddled together, watching the execution platform being built by the light of a dozen flares. The carpenters wore black masks and kept looking about them as though they expected a troop of demons to ride through the darkness and claim them. It is bad luck to kill a king.

  The executioner himself stood underneath a torch in the wall, sharpening his axe with a whetstone. He sharpened, and the sparks flew in orange spikes. He tested the blade with his thumb, and we saw it run red. There was a sheep in a cage near-by. It was the custom to try out the axe beforehand for those of noble birth. Two men took the sheep struggling from the cage and held it, its legs buckled underneath itself, while the executioner with a single straight swing whistled through the fleece and the muscle and the bone and did it so clean that I fancied I might pick up the head and sew it back on and let the sheep run off.

  There was a half-hearted cheer from the crew, who ran a skewer through the animal's body and put it to roast over their fires. The head and the fleece were given to a beggar.

  It was not until the afternoon that the King appeared in his linen shirt, his beard trimmed and nothing of him shivering, though many a spectator had fainted with cold. He knelt down and rested his head on the block, and I saw Tradescant's face stream with tears that froze at once and lay on his cheeks like diamonds. The King gave the signal, and a moment later his head was wrapped in a white cloth and his body was carried away.

  In the Crown of Thorns that night Tradescant made plans to take ship and leave us. I saw the look on Jordan's face and my heart became a captive in a locked room. I couldn't reach him now. I knew he would go.

  I went outside and walked until the lights of the inn were specks in the distance and I was alone with the river flowing out to sea.

  At a dancing school in a remote place, Fortunata teaches her pupils to become points of light.

  They begin with her as early as six or seven and some stay for the rest of their lives.

  Most, she releases like butterflies over a flowering world. Bodies that could have bent double and grown numb she maintains as metal in a fiery furnace, tempering, stretching, forcing sinews into impossible shapes and calling her an nature.

  She believes that we are fallen creatures who once knew how to fly. She says that light burns in our bodies and threatens to dissolve us at any moment. How else can we account for so many of us who disappear?

  It is her job to channel the light lying in the solar plexus, along the arms, along the legs, forcing it into fingertips and feet, forcing it out so that her dancers sweat tongues of flame.

  To her dancers she says, 'Through the body, the body is conquered.'

  She asks them to meditate on a five-pointed star in the belly and to watch the points push outwards, the fifth point into the head. She spins them, impaled with light, arms upraised, one leg at a triangle across the other thigh, one foot, on point, on a penny coin, and spins them, until all features are blurred, until the human being most resembles a freed spirit from a darkened jar. One after the other she spins them, like a juggler keeping plates on sticks; one after the other she runs up and down the line as one slows or another threatens to fall from dizziness. And at a single moment, when all are spinning in harmony down the long hall, she hears music escaping from their heads and backs and livers and spleens. Each has a tone like cut glass. The noise is deafening. And it is then that the spinning seems to stop, that the wild gyration of the dancers passes from movement into infinity.

  Who are they that shine in gold like Apostles in a church window at midday?

  The polished wooden floor glows with the heat of their bodies, and one by one they crumble over and lie exhausted on the ground.

  Fortunata refreshes them and the dance begins again.

  In the world there is a horror of plagues. Of mysterious diseases that wipe out towns and cities, leaving empty churches and bedclothes that must be burned. Holy water and crosses and mountain air and the protection of saints and a diet of watercress are all thought to save us as a species from rotting. But what can save us as a species from love? A man sold me a necklace made of chicken bones; he said these chickens were the direct descendants of the chickens who had scratted round the crib at Bethlehem. The bones would save me from pain of every kind and lead me piously to Heaven. He was wearing some himself.

  'And love?' I said. 'And love?'

  He shook his head and assured me that nothing was proof against love. Not even the slightest amourette could be forestalled by an amulet. Bringing it on, though, was another matter - did I want a bag of spices mixed by Don Juan himself?

  'But surely if it can be encouraged it can also be prevented?'

  'Not at all,' said the man, 'for everyone is inclined to love. It is easy to bring on, impossible to end until it ends itself.'

  'And yet some people never love. My mother is one such.'

  He said, 'They have a secret somewhere. Usually.'

  I thought of the great lovers, men and women who had made it their profession, who had tirelessly leapt from one passion to another, sometimes running two, three or four at once like a stunt charioteer. What were they looking for?

  My own passions had nothing to recommend them. Not only was I chasing a dancer who, on the evidence of her sisters, was too old to move, I had in the past entangled myself in numerous affairs with women who would not, could not or did not love me. And did I love them? I thought so at the time, though now I have come to doubt it, seeing only that I loved myself through them.

  On more than one occasion I have been ready to abandon my whole life for love. To alter everything that makes sense to me and to move into a different world where the only known will be the beloved. Such a sacrifice must be the result of love or is it that the life itself was already worn out? I had finished with that life, perhaps, and could not admit it, being stubborn or afraid, or perhaps did not know it, habit being a great binder.

  I think it is often so that those most in need of change choose to fall in love and then throw up their hands and blame it all on fate. But it is not fate, at least, not if fate is something outside of us; it is a choice made in secret after nights of longing.

  When I have shaken off my passion, somewhat as a dog shakes off an unexpected plunge into the canal, I find myself without any understanding of what it was that ravaged me. The beloved is shallow, witless, heartless, mercenary, calculating, silly. Naturally these thoughts protect me, but they also render me entirely gullible or without discrimination.

  And so I will explain it as follows.

  A man or woman sunk in dreams that cannot be spoken, about a life they do not possess, comes suddenly to a door in the wall. They open it. Beyond the door is that life and a man or a woman to whom it is already natural. It may not be possessions they want, it may very well be the lack of them, but the secret life is suddenly revealed. This is their true home and this is their beloved.

  I may be cynical when I say that very rarely is the beloved more than a shaping spirit for the lover's dreams. And perhaps such a thing is enough. To be a muse maybe enough. The pain is when the dreams change, as they do, as they must. Suddenly the enchanted city fades and you are left alone again in the windy desert. As for your beloved, she didn't understand you. The truth is, you never understood yourself.

  In one city I visited, the entire population had been wiped out by love three times in a row. After the third occasion the only two survivors, a monk and a whore, determined that love should be illegal in their new state and that anyone found indulging in it would be put to death.
Cheered by their admirable plan the two of them made love as often as possible and, thanks to the sturdiness of the whore, were soon able to re-fill the city with inhabitants. From their earliest moment children were warned of the dire consequences, personal and social, of love. They were urged to put aside any romantic fancies, the sexes were carefully segregated and all marriages were arranged. Sex itself, tending as it does to fire the heart as well as the groin, was possible only for the purposes of childbearing, or on the three festival nights when a troop of male and female prostitutes were hired from a neighbouring town and asked to satisfy the longings of the city dwellers. Naturally, even after such brief encounters, there were those who vanished in the night. The monk and the whore, now fabulously old but still absolutely in control, declared all such vanishings illegal and sequestered the person's property.

  I questioned them about their strictness, likening them to the Puritans holding sway in my own country. They had not heard of Puritanism, but found the idea of bandaging up the male member so as to leave it immovable very appealing. The religious side, they said, was unimportant; the urgency was to prevent another plague of love sweeping the city and causing its hardworking people to give up their jobs and families and take to flinging roses through the windows and composing ballads.

  'A few months of that sort of thing/ said the monk, 'and the people are ruined.'

  Then he told me how it had been the last time the plague had struck. It had started quietly enough, a few guitars in the moonlight, a few love-notes sent under cover of darkness. Then the mayor had fallen for a shop-girl and draped his chain of office over a public toilet. Then every single monk in the monastery was caught masturbating in front of a statue of Hildegard of Bingen. They ignored the call to prayer at five a.m. Indeed they ignored it for so long that the old man hired to ring the bell died of heart failure. He was still pulling at eight o'clock, and so were the monks.

  Worse, ordinary men and women, with no eccentricity in their natures, began to eye one another and die for love. Every day new graves were dug in the hillside. The grave-digger himself was so struck by the woman he was burying that he wrenched the lid from her coffin and got in. After hours of pleading his family lost patience and threw the soil in themselves. After that the dead were thrown into the river, and then of course everyone who was left died of contamination. Except the monk, who was on a fast and drinking only holy water from the monastery cellar, and the whore, who drank no water at all.