A lot of small men would like to be heroes, they have to have their fantasy moment. Thing is, the small ones always get killed.
I went to the Navy recruitment office and they told me about all the sophisticated equipment I'd be using and all the places I'd see. They had a film show about life in the Navy and afterwards an old Admiral turned up and told us how he'd learned to iron his bell-bottom trousers with seven creases for the seven seas.
There was a lot about camaraderie and mates. It's not homosexual, of course.
Jack and I went to the park. I had my boat, he had his books. It was windy and the pond looked like grey icing forked over. I left him on a bench and went down to the gravel edge. I trimmed the sail and got ready to lean my boat into the water. The wind took her right into the middle and bent the rigging sideways. I got her back in the end but she was damaged. The wind made my eyes run and Jack thought I was crying. He was embarrassed and tried to laugh too loud at a woman whose deckchair had blown inside out.
He said, 'You're too old for this boat stuff.'
I said, 'Why am I?'
He shrugged and told me he was getting a Saturday job for the holidays.
My mother and father are very tidy eaters. They arrange their food according to colour and shape and eat proportionally so that they never have too much of one thing and too little of another. I eat all of my peas first and this annoys them.
We have been talking about my career in the Navy.
'What if there's a war?' said my mother.
'You and I were both in the war,' said my father. 'We're all right'
'It was nerve-racking,' said my mother.
'It wasn't too bad, we had good times - do you remember when we danced together and then made love in the dark?'
'Don't say that in front of Nicolas,' said my mother. Then, after a little pause, 'It was nerve-racking.'
Did she mean the war or making love to my father?
I was accepted as a naval cadet. We were proud when the letter arrived. My mother put it in a folder she has with other things of mine.
The night before I left we had a special dinner and a bottle of wine. My mother was nervous, my father was loud. I tried to leave my peas till last.
At bed-time I went into my room and put out the light. I didn't get undressed. I lay on my bed and looked out of the window at the stars. I read in a book that the stars can take you anywhere. I've never wanted to be an astronaut because of the helmets. If I were up there on the moon, or by the Milky Way, I'd want to feel the stars round my head. I'd want them in my hair the way they are in paintings of the gods. I'd want my whole body to feel the space, the empty space and points of light. That's how dancers must feel, dancers and acrobats, just for a second, that freedom.
Even if you were free from gravity it wouldn't feel good in a space suit. Wouldn't you want to be naked? Naked and turning your body in slow somersaults through a new atmosphere?
People say the magic has gone out of the moon now that someone's stood on it. I don't think so. It would take more than a man's foot to steal the moon.
We've been everywhere in the world and now we've gone into space.
My father watches space films. They're different: they're the only area of undiminished hope. They're happy and they have women in them who are sometimes scientists rather than singers or waitresses. Sometimes the women get to be heroes too, though this is still not as popular. When I watch space films I always want to cry because they leave you with so much to hope for, it feels like a beginning, not a tired old end.
But when we've been everywhere, and it's only a matter of time, where will we go next, when there are no more wildernesses?
Will it take as long as that before we start the journey inside, down our own time tunnels and deep into the realms of inner space?
My bedroom was put away. I had put myself away in cupboards or out of sight. It was a spare room now. I was leaving home. In the light from the window I could see my empty shelves and the shoes I wouldn't need neat in a row under the wardrobe. It was an old wardrobe with a mirror on the inside door. I looked at myself once more in the morning before I left. I looked all right.
Six months later I was on board an admiralty tug in the Thames Estuary outside Deptford. We were after a mine someone had spotted, or said they had. There was no hurry. The public were reassured by our presence and we were reassured by ourselves. It was a warm night, the lights of London and the black water all restful enough. I was content.
I was standing on deck with a friend of mine. He was an astronomer of sorts and liked to show me the constellations. I didn't tell him I already knew them.
Then he said, 'You know, if we were turned loose in our galaxy, just let out there one day by ourselves, it wouldn't look like it does from here. We'd see nothing but blackness. All those stars that hang so close together are light years apart. Our chances of finding any star or planet at all, forget about a blue planet like this one, would be a billion billion.'
He laughed and went below.
I rested my arms on the railing and my head on my arms. I felt I was falling falling into a black hole with no stars and no life and no helmet. I heard a foot scrape on the deck beside me. Then a man's voice said, They are burying the King at Windsor today.' I snapped upright and looked full in the face of the man, who was staring out over the water. I knew him but from where? And his clothes nobody wears clothes like that any more.
I looked beyond him, upwards. The sails creaked in the breeze, the main spar was heavy with rope. Further beyond I saw the Plough and Orion and the bright sickle of the moon.
I heard a bird cry, sharp and fierce. Tradescant sighed.
My name is Jordan.
I am a woman going mad. I am a woman hallucinating. I imagine I am huge, raw, a giant. When I am a giant I go out with my sleeves rolled up and my skirts swirling round me like a whirlpool. I have a sack such as kittens are drowned in and I stop off all over the world filling it up. Men shoot at me, but I take the bullets out of my cleavage and I chew them up. Then I laugh and laugh and break their guns between my fingers the way you would a wish-bone.
First Stop: the World Bank.
I go straight to the boardroom. There's a long hardwood table surrounded by comfortable chairs. Men in suits are discussing how to deal with the problem of the Third World. They want to build dams, clear the rain forests, finance huge Coca-Cola plants and exploit the rubber potential.
They say, 'This is a private meeting.'
I start at the top end and I pick them up one by one by the scruff of their necks. Their legs wriggle in their Gucci suits; I've got nothing against the suits, lovely material. I drop them into my sack, all screaming at once about calling their lawyers and who do I think I am and what about free speech and civil liberties.
When they're all in the bag, I leave the room tidy, throw in a few calculators so they won't be bored, and off we go.
Next Stop: the Pentagon.
I smash through the maximum security doors, past the computers, the secrets, the army of secretaries, and burst into a band of generals and lesser lights talking about defence and peace and how to eliminate the nuclear threat by ordering more weapons. I listen carefully while they tell me with all the patience of a mother to a defective child that if we don't have enough force to blow up the world fifty times over, we're not safe. If we do, we are.
I say, 'Your own statistics show that, if three per cent of the Defence Budget were spent on the poverty problem in the United States over the next ten years, there would be no problem, you'd wipe it out.'
They look at one another and give little indulgent chuckles and turn back to work. I have no choice. I grab them by their medals and drop them in the bag. One of them pokes his head out of the top and says, 'You should be arrested. What you're doing is dangerous!'
And then...
I snatch world leaders from motorcades, from mansion house dinners, from embassies and private parties. I throw them all in the bag and we
go on foot to the butter mountains and wine lakes and grain silos and deserts and cracked earth and starving children and arms dealers in guarded palaces.
I force all the fat ones to go on a diet, and all the men line up for compulsory training in feminism and ecology. Then they start on the food surpluses, packing it with their own hands, distributing it in a great human chain of what used to be power and is now co-operation.
We change the world, and on the seventh day we have a party at the wine lake and make pancakes with the butter mountain and the peoples of the earth keep coming in waves and being fed and being clean and being well. And when the rivers sparkle, it's not with mercury...
That's how it started, the mercury. That's where my hallucinations began, checking mercury levels in rivers and lakes and streams. Any where that profit might have been. The levels were always too high, the fish were dying, children had strange scaly diseases which the government said had no connection with anything whatsoever.
I started a one-woman campaign, the sort you read about in the papers where the woman is thought to be a bit loopy but harmless enough. They hope you'll go away, get older, get bored. Time is a great deadener.
I didn't go away. I wrote articles and pushed fact sheets through front doors. I developed a passion for personal evangelism. I stopped housewives on street corners and working men in caffs. Where women were high-placed I asked for money and help.
The cost to myself was high. Too high, I thought, when I was depressed, which was often. The trouble is that when most people are apathetic ordinary people like me have to go too far, have to ruin their lives and be made an object of scorn just to get the point across. Did they really think I'd rather be camping by a polluted river than sitting in my own flat with my things about me?
People will believe anything.
Except, it seems, the truth.
I was a lonely child. My parents found me difficult, not the child they had wanted. I was too intense, too physically awkward and too quiet for them. My best times were outside with our dogs. Parents want to see themselves passed on in their children. It comforts them to recognize a twist of the head or a way of talking. If there are no points -of recognition, if the child is genuinely alien, they do their best to feed and clothe, but they don't love. Not in the transforming way of love.
So I learned to be alone and to take pleasure in the dark where no one could see me and where I could look at the stars and invent a world where there was no gravity, no holding force. I wasn't fat because I was greedy; I hardly ate at all. I was fat because I wanted to be bigger than all the things that were bigger than me. All the things that had power over me. It was a battle I intended to win.
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 egowho 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 w
ith 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.
Sexing the Cherry Page 11
